I hope Firefox gains more momentum. I don't trust Google, I don't want them to control everything. FF 13 is fast and modern browser. Installing Ghostery, AdBlock and Firebug makes it perfect.
Firefox used to be my browser of choice, but now it's the worst of all for me.
There are two main problems:
1. Sometimes I start FF and it tells me that its process is still running. It happens too often that I close FF and it fails to properly terminate its process. The result is that I can't open FF until I kill it in the task manager.
2. Firefox is the only browser in which Flash crashes. Almost every day I had to search for the "Plugin container for Firefox" in the task manager and manually kill it.
Today the browsers that "just work" are IE9 and Chrome. I can't use Chrome all the time because it doesn't open images in Twitter, probably because images use http and Twitter uses https. Every browser has its own little problems. Those of Firefox are too much for me.
Sounds like a corrupt profile. If you’re interested in trying to fix it then you could delete your profile and start again (or if you’re running a beta or newer Firefox go to about:support and click on ‘Reset Firefox’).
I know your problem from 1. but after some time on Chrome (Chromium) I realised that it's faster to kill one FF process instead of killing x chrome processes looking for the right one that is broken and still running after I "closed" the browser.
I don't know what it was that crashed my chrome that often. It must have been java or flash because it broke down on pages that are loaded with these.
In the end I came back to ff. All my good addons are there, they all work and if it breaks down it's way faster to kill then chrome.
Initially I tried chrome because I thought it may eat up less memory but the difference was not really big on all the chrome processes compared to the ff one.
Well, I also have the same problem with Firefox, where it does not shut itself down properly. But as for Flash, since recently it started consuming up to 300% of the CPU for me on 32 bit Linux. So I would not say that Chrome is all that bug free.
How is managing the development of something that is totally open source "controlling everything"? That's like claiming that you don't want to use Linux because you don't trust Linus.
The code is there. If they do something you don't like, you can always fork.
Maybe a better counter argument is, that I don't really have a big trust for corporations. I can trust Linus because he's a hacker just like I am. I can trust Mozilla because their goal is to build web as hackers. Then we have a big advertisement company who are building some nice things, but they still have the desire to sell commercials. To gather data about us and do some data mining.
That's the reason I prefer Mozilla over Google as an organization.
Same here. I had switched to Chrome a few months ago but have switched back since then. The last versions of Firefox are a great step toward the perfect browser: excellent performances and startup time, great addons, and a smaller memory footprint than Chrome.
To be fair, Google Chrome is completely open source too, expect for the integrated PDF Reader and Flash. You can compile Chromium from the source and add these two manually, if you need them.
It's a bit of both with a healthy sprinkling of Nokia, Samsung, and quite a few others. In reality, WebKit has been driving the standards process for quite some time now (especially considering its unrivaled dominance on mobile).
It's Google that decides what features and protocols are implemented into Chrome. Since they control a large share of the market, it basically gives them life or death power on new features of web languages.
Full disclosure: I work on Chrome. Accepting that, I think it's pretty clear that Iron is scamware. It's just an outdated Chromium build with some hardcoded preferences and support for a text file of blocked URLs (something far better implemented by extensions). The creator makes money from ads on the homepage, default search provider, and install page. You can read a bit more background here:
Coincidentally, I recently poked at Iron to determine if it includes the security and stability fixes we merge for stable releases. So, I tried to get the source code to make the analysis easier. It turns out there's no repository, and I had to wait eight hours pulling 1GB of archives from Rapidshare. When I finally opened it I found a tarball from Chrome 6, which is almost two years old (even though Iron is obviously using Chrome 18). So, I don't think the creator is very concerned about keeping up pretenses (like being an open source project) anymore.
My understanding was it was a 'fake' in that it offered 0 more than vanilla chromium in terms of separation from google/privacy (although chromium is a pain to update- and even somewhat difficult to find downloads for).
Agreed. Internet Explorer with TPL support is a better proposition than Chrome. Firefox as well. Both browsers are putting the user first and not the vendor.
Chrome is simply not trustworthy. Why would you get a browser from an advertising company that uses people's data to make money?
Google Chrome is completely open source and can be easily compiled from the source (expect for its integrated Flash player and PDF reader). If you don't like something about it, please change it.
People are using an open source browser + Flash Player + PDF Reader.
If you don't trust Google's Flash player and PDF reader, feel free to take them out. In fact, you don't have to, because using Chromium would be equivalent to doing this.
People arent using trademarks, they are using software. And the same is slso true for FF. The open source one is called iceweasel, because the logo and name of Firefox are protected.
A compiled chromium source is identical to Google Chrone, except for the icon and name. Just like with Firefox.
* The Firefox logo is not released under a free license
* The Firefox name and logo are trademarked, and Mozilla has strict policies you must adhere to if you want to use them
However, you can build Firefox without using the name or logo. Requiring derived works to have different branding does not mean a program is not open source or free software.
