I have been a Chrome user since shortly after the browser launched. I contend that no other Browser can quite match Chrome for speed and clean UI design.
However, in light of the recent NSA scandals and growing privacy concerns, Firefox had caught my eye again as being a browser that is wholly open-source in nature.
So I have given it a go… a really strong go. I pretty much switched off of Chrome entirely. This was no simple task. As a person that does a lot of research I often find myself handling 30 or 40 tabs at a time and have a fairly extensive bookmark library. However I am soon going to be switching off of firefox and back to Chrome or something else… Here is why…
I dove into Firefox optimistic, and rightfully so for the following reasons:
1. It is totally open-source
2. The UI has been drastically cleaned up and improved
3. The FF team has started to make speed a focus again
4. The built-in system of handling tabs is phenomenal
That last point, regarding the tab/window handling system, was by far the most exciting feature as someone who uses tabs and windows heavily. Finally having a way to organize all of that and keep it was a big deal.
However I am going to start moving off of FireFox tomorrow and probably back into Chrome and here is why…
1. It is really slow and it is a memory hog
— Chrome is fast, much faster in fact that Firefox and while I could live with the minor page speed loading differences, the fact is that it also eats up a lot more memory on my system than Chrome did.
2. Firefox is bug ridden – Firefox crashes on my fairly often… more often though I get page artifacting and graphical errors, blacked out areas on a page, ultra sluggish response time on page elements, pages with flash like to crash on occasion.
Point two was really the breaking point. The bugginess of Firefox has finally just put me over the top. I shouldn’t have to think about my browser when I am using it. Plain and simple. A browser is a program that is there to work and not be noticed. Firefox is more and more becoming a pain. It’s not a horrible browser by any stretch of the imagination. However I have come to realize that Chrome is a phenomenally GOOD browser and when you are used to that, really nothing else will suffice.
Regards…