The most bizarre part of this is coworkers ridiculing someone for using a completely modern browser that's just as up-to-date as Chrome, and possibly with better privacy. Completely bizarre to me. I'm glad I don't work there.
I think ridicule may have been a little bit of hyperbole. If he genuinely felt ridiculed and uncomfortable I doubt he would be writing about it on his blog.
I think it would be bizarre to work in an environment where people did not joke about each other's "questionable" technology choices. The vim guy catches flak in the emacs shop. The debian guy (me) catches flak from his OSX friends asking if I recompiled my kernel for the 10th time in order to get my "flaky" free video driver to work. When I do habitat for humanity work I hear guys teasing someone for still using a miter box or for using the kickback guard on a table saw. I think a certain amount of teasing is healthy and natural among friendly coworkers.
Sidenote: I've been a FF user since it was firebird and I don't expect that to change.
They're not ridiculing him. It's natural and desirable for developers to be curious about other developers' setup.
I agree Chrome has never made lots of tabs easy. Since I'm usually signing into multiple accounts, I have several windows open anyway, so don't feel the pain as much as I used to.
I find this point and the XHR annoyance not enough to sway me though. Devtools keeps getting insanely more powerful to the point where front-ends will probably be using it as a proper IDE in a couple of years.
Yeah. Good grief. What kind of person ridicules a co-worker repeatedly for their browser choice? Even IE, maybe joke about it once and then move to something important like text editors.
Ok, fair enough. It's easy to imagine something different from an article than how it is in real life. I'm personally invested in Firefox too so it's easy to react against Chrome fanboys and the FUD they can spread.
I would have described my work the same way, even if that's taking a bit of poetic license. I started developing in Aurora about six months ago to try out some of the new dev tools. The question of why is a surprisingly regular conversation with anyone who notices, starting anywhere from "Why don't you use Chrome" to "What the hell are you using this for?"
Chrome comes bundled with Flash and a proprietary PDF renderer; proprietary plugins, especially Flash, have historically been a rich source of privacy and security problems.
The fully open-source build of Chrome (called Chromium) avoids that problem but is more difficult to install on some platforms.
In theory, Chrome sends your entire browsing history over to Google, since its unified omnibar doesn't distinguish between searching and typing in location. Firefox (and any browser that separates the location and search bar) doesn't have this problem.
To be frank I'm not sure how Google uses this information, but it does make me laugh when the whole Ubuntu Dash searches Amazon thing blew up. It's the same thing, really, yet nobody talks about Chrome at all.
"""Whenever you pause while typing in the address bar,
the text you've typed is sent to Google so predictions
can be retrieved. Google logs a random two percent of
these requests in order to help improve the service.
This information is anonymized within 24 hours.
"""
there is conceptionally no support for functionality akin to noscript (as in the firefox addon, not the chromium plugin with less functionality), request policy, etc. even adblock works better in firefox.
allowing these plugins is a decision that also has drawbacks. the browser will need to support synchronous callbacks (i.e. to possibly block http requests). these can block the browser, something chromium plugins cannot do (at least so easily).
I use Chrome and often have ~100 tabs open. I spread them across multiple windows and try to keep related tabs together in their own window.
I use the excellent Session Buddy[0] extension to make this easier. With that, I can save windows ('tab groups') and restore them easily, and it also has a nice list view showing all windows I have open and the tabs in each (which is usually the best way to find a single tab).
I've been using Chrome for a few years and just moved back to FireFox because Chrome's insane memory usage (on desktop).
There are some rough spots in the UX still: (1) I miss my omnibar from Chrome (2) seems like scrolling can be jankier
But I prefer to use a Browser from a non-profit like Mozilla, which I feel safer with.
I do hope the Firefox team focuses on UX, speed, standards compliance, and security while keeping their browser slim and fast. Less features often means better UX since the UI is less cluttered.
Here are some power user tips for the awesomebar:
^ xxx - search xxx in your browsing history.
* xxx - search xxx in your bookmarks.
+ xxx - search xxx in pages you've tagged.
% xxx - search xxx in your currently open tabs.
~ xxx - search xxx in pages you've typed.
# xxx - search xxx in page titles.
@ xxx - search xxx in web addresses (URLs).
It's a bit ironic: I moved away from Firefox about four years ago because of its memory usage, and now I'm considering switching back from Chrome for pretty much the same reason.
I'm in the same boat: I love chrome (actually, it's my primary browser), but I can never quite leave Firefox because of the plugins:
- Multifox ( N different browser sessions, rather than just one for incognito mode and one for normal browsing)
- DNS Flusher (Chrome staunchly refuses to accept when I change my hosts file, which I do daily to switch between live, staging, and production servers).
- Tamper Data (a great tool for monitoring and messing with http requests from your browser).
Actually, Chrome has multi-session support built in. Try clicking on the head icon in the top right corner (on OS X) and click "New User". You'll get a new context with it's own cookies, cache, window etc. that you can switch to anytime.
I'm in the same boat but my plugin of choice is Tab Mix Plus. I can't function without multi-row tabs; my style of browsing is to open lots of tabs. Chrome becomes useless to me in 15-20 minutes of heavy work-related browsing due to too many tiny indistinguishable tabs.
Same here, I need Tab Mix Plus for the switching of last tab behavior. The one when press CTRL+Tab it switches back to the previous tab and not the next tab.
Absolutely nothing's wrong with FF, but there are sometimes reasons to use chrome. Different browsers, different bugs, after all... :]
I normally use FF, but there are situations where I use chrome instead (both very up-to-date versions, so more or less as good as they get).
chrome uses more memory on average because of the multi-process architecture, but that architecture also makes user-control of memory usage much more convenient, because closing a tab with a memory-hog page in it immediately releases a hefty chunk of memory (whereas this usually isn't the case with FF). So sometimes when my memory is running low, I'll use chrome, despite the higher average memory usage, to get the increased controllability.
There are also cases of bleeding edge html5 stuff where the chrome implementation works better. E.g., both seem to support webgl in general, but some webgl-using pages only work properly in chrome for me.
It's really nice to have available two completely independent implementations of a modern, featureful, robust web-browser... Before chrome, there was [on linux] basically FF and a bunch of toy browsers, and the latter were often not very usable for many pages.
As I posted in another thread I periodically test Firefox against Chrome (well Chromium actually, as I refuse to use closed source Chrome) on the pages I frequent.
Firefox typically is faster and consumes less memory at least for the sites I frequent.
As far as tabs go, if I need organization I have multiple windows of Chrome open with different tabs across different work spaces on my Macbook, and I can just three finger swipe between them.
Usually, I have one window open with a bunch of relevant iOS dev tabs (Apple Docs / stack overflow threads) in the space with XCode and Simulator, and another window open with my email / work-related tabs open just a three-finger swipe away.
Also, does anyone else find that giant banner "A new kind of magazine for thoughtful shoppers." a bit intrusive?
Actually there is an option, if you go to chrome://flags on Mac you can turn on "Tab Overview", which lets you hold down option and swipe down with 3 fingers to see an expose type overview of all open tabs. Pretty nice.
I'm a browser extension/addon developer and I can tell you that firefox lets you do extra functionalities that the chrome API won't let you, at the cost of making it hard to code an extension (e.g: extra markup language like XUL).
I love my FF with Roomy Bookmarks, Alexa, Status-4Eva, and LastTab
That said the only reason I have Firefox around is for that tool and browser testing. I keep subconsciously coming back to Chrome for most of my daily tasks and the lovable Omnibar.
Firefox user here. There are so many great plugins I would love to use chrome for, but one singular thing keeps me using Firefox: side tabs.
Not even tree style, just a plain and simple side tab list. I'm a tab addict and I can't live without opening a dozen every session. Then i keep them open for weeks like a todo list.
Does anyone know if it's possible to write a chrome plugin that can integrate right into the side of the chrome window?
I researched it briefly, at that time it was not possible.
There are lots of attempts to be "good enough" at tab management to make surviving without tree tabs possible. Some of them come close, most don't. At the end of the day, I changed my workflow to work with Chrome, rather than vice-versa because I found Chrome's responsiveness more valuable than Firefox's plugins.
Yes, firefox tabs are definitely way better. I am a tab addict too - right now I have open 20 of them, and that's only because it's night and I'm not working and done most of my daily reading and closed the extra ones. Usually it'd easily be 30+ of them. Firefox allows to manage them much better. I still use Chrome though because FF memory management is still - even with recent improvements gets out of hand pretty quickly (matter of days with my - admittedly heavy - usage). But their tab system is one thing which always tempts me to switch. It is way ahead of what Chrome can do.
I encountered them on a 'Nix browser, Skipstone (gtk toolkit browser, probably using Gecko) back in 2000. What I heard was that Opera had pioneered the feature. At the time, browsers were one window per page, which ... pretty much completely sucked.
I got addicted to left-pane treeview bookmarks waaay back in my Opera days, imported into FF, still waiting on Chrome (sheesh). But at this point I doubt it would make a difference since the performance advantage has been pretty much erased. FF is fine -- what is Chrome's real advantage these days? Honest question...
And there's still not even a decent extension that does it, which seems really odd to me. Anyone know of one (left pane bookmarks that is)?
The problem (at least when I last looked) was that Chrome's extension framework just plain makes it impossible to create an extension that supports side tabs properly.
I find Firefox uses less RAM on my machine and the extensions work far better, I don't any advantage to using Chrome.
I'm pretty minimalist when it comes to add-on usage, but until Chrome's font rendering stops being dogshit compared to other browsers on Windows -- particularly with East Asian fonts -- I'm sticking with Firefox.
Agree with both points from the author. The other 2 big ones that I can't get Chrome to do as well as Firefox are Type-Ahead Find, and the default behaviour of the location bar to match on any URL in your history. The Chrome version tries to be too clever. I just want straight text-to-URL matching.
For me, it's history sync that brought be back to firefox. If you use HN/reddit/etc. from multiple computers, history sync is really helpful. Last I checked, chrome didn't sync history.
Let me know when chrome lets you simple resend a network request. Also when I can write lengthy JS programs on the console and check their effect on the page.
I found it pretty easy to switch from Firebug to chrome devtools. They were behind for some time but now I hardly can imagine a case where Chrome devtools did not work for me the same way as Firebug.
