Recently, I migrated ‘permanently’ to Google Chrome from Firefox. I am not very happy to leave my ‘natural’ habit to launch Firefox after starting Windows, but I could not find any reason to stay further with Mozilla’s open-source browser. Initially, I had several reasons to skip Chrome even it was MUCH faster and stable than the Firefox. I kept on using Firefox because of these two reasons:
Add-ons
I love customizing my browser. There are some awesome Firefox add-ons for that; like Adblock plus, NoScript, Firebug, Greasemonkey, User Agent Switcher, Live HTTP Headers, YouTube Downloader etc. Thankfully, Chrome has got some really powerful extensions lately. Now, I can find substitutes for all my favorite Firefox add-ons in Chrome.
Thankfully, many features are already bundled in Chrome – without requiring any extension at all! For example, Chrome has native support for user scripts (greasemonkey scripts), controlling JavaScript, altering User-Agent, viewing HTTP headers etc. I had installed above seven add-ons in Firefox, while after migrating to Chrome, I have installed just two: Adblock and YouTube Downloader. In fact, I found the “Developer tools” of Chrome much convenient than the Firebug.
Hope
I am frustrated with the performance of Firefox specially on my netbook. It takes 10 seconds or more to launch even when I have not installed any add-on and not opted for session restore on start. It becomes unresponsive several times and consumes lots of system resources as compared to Chrome and Internet Explorer. Still, I had HOPE for improvement. I closely follow Firefox’s development and every positive report about performance improvement excited me a lot. But the actual fact is quite different from the claims of Mozilla team. Of course, Firefox has become faster – but only in comparison with the older versions of itself, not when compared to Chrome or even Internet Explorer.
I have totally lost my hope in Firefox team. Although, they are doing their best by fixing all possible issues and improvements like Snappy, Tabs-on-demand, Memshrink are going in the right direction – but these are not enough. In last one year, Mozilla has released around 8 new versions of Firefox, but they are still struggling with the same issue.
