My Experience: Chrome vs Firefox
Before you start reading this, I’m not going to pick a favorite between these two browsers. If you’re looking for a clear cut choice, you will not find it here.
That said…
I can’t believe I’ve been using the internet in some form since 2000. What I really can’t believe is how I survived with Internet Explorer. Now, should I be working on a fresh Windows install, my first move is always to install an alternate browser. But what browser will it be? I really can’t say… I don’t use just one browser anymore.
As you probably can figure out by now, the two browsers I’ll be talking about are Google‘s Chrome browser and Mozilla‘s famous Firefox browser. Both are useful. Both have their advantages. How do I use them?
Firefox has obviously been on the scene longer. I’ve come to fully respect Firefox as a very stable and versatile browser. Over the years, I’ve come across many different add-ons that I have found to be very useful. Chatzilla, Colorzilla, Greasemonkey, Firebug, FireFTP, MeasureIt, ScreenGrab, ShowIP. Actually, those are the very ones I enjoy using. They’re helpful in so many ways.
Tabbed browsing forever changed the way I did work. I went from having multiple windows open and having to try and go through them to having just one window with multiple tabs. It definitely made it much easier to work.
For a good while, Firefox was my browser of choice. I got to a point, though, where I would enjoy keeping several tabs saved with Firefox. But what if I wanted to just look at a page real fast? I didn’t want to have to load Firefox, with the tabs I had open, just for a quick look somewhere.
Well, when Chrome came on the scene, that changed. After giving it a go, I quickly found my browser for such a purpose. Not only did it handle tabbed browsing well, but it also seemed to do things in a very simple manner. The UI is clean. It seems to run pretty fast, too, something that I was not liking about IE7.
So, how can I sum up my use of these two browsers?
Firefox is my all-in-one browser. The add-on capabilities just make it so easy to do various things, from figuring out colors as I’m working on a site to being able to just about anything else I need. Even Greasemonkey makes Firefox helpful with some gaming (for reasons I’ll talk about in an upcoming blog).
Chrome is there for me for my everyday browsing. If I’m just loading links from email or IM, or just want to check some message boards quickly, that’s my browser choice.
No, I don’t think one is better than the other. No, I don’t feel a need to just use one. I think these two each have their benefits and can easily be used together. If you’ve never tried either of them, why not try them now?