Chrome or Firefox - which browser to choose?

Chrome is the newest baby in browser family or the next competitor in browser war. What ever it is, Google released their browser named Chrome. But Mozilla Firefox is the most popular browser in the world right now and Google was the major supporter for Firefox. Even while supporting it, they have built their own browser free and open source. Here we are looking at the two browsers and trying to compare them to decide whether to switch to the new one or not leaving our old but fascinating friend Firefox?

Interesting features

1. One Process per each tab
Tab is not another thread running inside the browser process; there is a separate process per tab. Even if one tab crashes, the rest of the tabs will be running as nothing happened; which was not available in Firefox. This is one of the most interesting features.

2. New tab is filled with useful links
For a new tab in Firefox, you can load a predefined page, a blank page or a predefined set of page links (using an extension). But you would be much happier to see a set of links that you dealt with in recent past; Chrome comes exactly with that. The new tab will show a set of links;

• Most visited pages
• Recently closed
• Recently Bookmarked

I do not think the last one will be much useful, but the other two will be pretty handy.

3. Rich Location bar
Location bar in Chrome is a combination of location bar & search bar. You can directly type a url or a search keyword, also it comes with suggestions.
Using separate location bar per each tab is also an interesting move, each tab looks like individual browser instances; while in firefox you have single location bar shared by all tabs.

4. Speed
Stephen Shankland at CNet has posted an article on speed, and it tells most of the details. However Brendan at MozillaZine has published another set of testing statistics. So we'll have to check some statistics done by an independent party to get a clear view. Anyway Chrome is starting up so fast compared to any other browser.

Some complains

Since Chrome is still in beta, this may be a good time to suggest some features or improvements. Following are some complains that we have.

1. No warning in closing
When multiple tabs are opened Firefox is used to show a warning in closing the browser, but Chrome does not and closes immediately. Since people can accidentally close the browser better to add it soon.

2. Displaying different fonts
Some of the fonts are not displayed smoothly as Firefox used to do. Above image shows how the same content is displayed in two of these browsers.

3. No XML viewer
May be it is not a must to have a XML viewer in a browser, but we are used to it. Firefox and IE both have good XML viewers, but Chrome lacks it. Similar to this Opera and Safari also do not have this feature. Many people happened to work with XML files every day and having an XML viewer in the browser is an added advantage.

4. Security issues
Chrome has exposed to a set of known security issues by using an older version of WebKit, which had already been fixed. Anyway we expect Google to fix it soon.

Main Concern

Above all of these our main concern is the lack of support for extension development. We are used to live with some great extensions with Firefox, which we are not experiencing with Chrome. Since it is still in beta version, we should wait for extension support. However no API is released for extension development, users will have to wait longer than expected to see some useful extensions. There are so many extensions that makes our lives easier and better. Few of them are;

• NoScrip
• Adblock
• Gmail Manager

What are the other reasons that you are not switching to Chrome straightaway?

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