Thursday, April 7, 2011

Reasons why Mozilla Firefox is better than Google Chrome

In this blog post I will be listing the reasons why I believe Firefox is better than Chrome. This post is not meant to sway you away from your current browser (if you are not using Firefox); I simply wish to voice my opinion on this matter.This post will not compare Firefox and Chrome to any other browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari because Firefox and Chrome are what I consider to be the two best browsers out there right now which is why I will focus on discussing them in this post.

Note: Comparisons will be done between the latest stable versions of Firefox and Chrome.
Note II: This post is currently incomplete. I will finish it off later when I have some free time.

Here goes ...

1) Firefox has more customization options. Every single part of the browser can be tailored to your liking.

Don't like the way the user interface looks? There's a tweak for that. With the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), every single thing dealing with the UI can be changed. Users can tweak the Firefox UI to suit their tastes and preferences perfectly. Google Chrome, on the other hand, has zero customization available with their UI except for the ability of hiding the bookmarks toolbar, which isn't even worth mentioning as every browser can do this.

My Firefox layout: the UI has been made more transparent; the navigation toolbar, tabs, new tabs page, find bar, and bookmarks sidebar (not in picture), etc. are all transparent. Borders around the toolbar buttons have been removed and the height of both the tabs bar and navigation toolbar have been slimmed down a bit.

In addition to the standard browser options that Firefox has, additional user preferences can be viewed and modified in Firefox's about:config page. In there you can change the a multitude of things dealing with the behavior of Firefox. Chrome, however, only offers some very basic user preferences to its users.

----this section is incomplete----
2) Firefox has better add-on support.

3) Firefox has better tab management.

4) Chrome vs. Firefox benchmark results.

5) More to come soon.
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Common arguments people have for why Chrome is better:
"It starts up faster!"
Yes, because 1 second start-up time makes such a big difference, right?

"It loads faster!"
Yeah, by a few milliseconds maybe.

"It has sandboxing!"
This is a pretty useful feature admittedly; even if a site crashes one of your tabs, all of your others will be safe. But then again, I have been using the Firefox 4 betas and nightly builds for the past few months and am using the official Firefox 4 release now and have only experienced maybe 2 crashes during that time interval. Even when it did crash, I was able to start it up right after and continue right where I left off thanks to its nice little saved session feature.

So in summary, I would say that Firefox is an overall better browser than Chrome. The only thing that Chrome has over Firefox is that it is maybe a bit faster.The difference in speed isn't even noticeable though.

If you are a casual internet surfer who wants something that is fast and simple to use and don't need all of the extra features and add-ons that Firefox can provide then Chrome is a decent option. But if you are looking for a little something more then I would recommend you go with Firefox.

So what do you think? Feel free to voice your opinion below.

3 Comments:

Jeffrey-sama said... [Reply]

Chrome > Firefox

Unknown said... [Reply]

The recent add ons really make Firefox 4 the ideal browser, we have a post about the great add ons: http://www.softwarecrew.com/2011/04/10-great-add-ons-for-tweaking-customising-and-improving-firefox-4/

Take a look at it and feel free to let us know how you feel about it.
-David @ Softwarecrew.com

Anonymous said... [Reply]

I know this is a very dated post, but doing a quick internet search you were one of the top hits. My two cents: I use only Chrome (90%) and Firefox. I just recently discovered that if you don't like those totally annoying YouTube ads popping up at the beginning of a song/video/whatever, use Firefox. There are no ads. Chrome is where the ads are. I will be using Firefox more and more and not Chrome as I hate ads.

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