Yostivanich

PC World yes­ter­day ran a piece on Chrome and Fire­fox, com­par­ing the two and essen­tially Fire­fox was dead and Chrome was going to win the lat­est browser battle.

Run Chrome and Fire­fox side-by-side, and Fire­fox is embar­rass­ingly slow. It’s not even in the same league. It’s an old man on the run­ning track try­ing to com­pete against a sprightly 20-year-old.

I think Fire­fox has lost the plot.

Per­son­ally I think the lat­est release of both Chrome and Fire­fox are good and solid releases that build upon what both of the browsers do really well. Chrome has a focus on three main things, speed, secu­rity, and get­ting out of the way. Fire­fox on the other hand, reli­a­bil­ity, speed and exten­si­bil­ity. While both are in my per­sonal and unsci­en­tific test­ing fast, nei­ther is so fast as to make a huge dif­fer­ence towards using one over the other.

Chrome has one lim­it­ing thing that keeps me from using it, a lack of exten­sions. Granted in the some of the lat­est devel­oper edi­tions, which I am run­ning, there is now sup­port for exten­sions. How­ever these exten­sions limit some­thing that I enjoy so much in Fire­fox, the exten­sions are cur­rently lim­ited to JavaScript files that are tacked onto each of the pages that you visit. While JavaScript can cer­tainly do a lot of things inside of the browser and such, it can’t make Chrome look dif­fer­ent, or inter­act out­side of a par­tic­u­lar browser win­dow. That pro­vides a lim­i­ta­tion that Fire­fox exten­sions don’t have.

At the same time, to quote Dave Winer: “Fire­fox hasn’t shipped a fea­ture that I care about in a long time.” Indeed what new fea­ture did Fire­fox ship with lately that I cared about? Noth­ing, I still and will always rec­om­mend Fire­fox to peo­ple and to switch away from IE and even Safari (don’t get me wrong Safari is a good browser, I just don’t like some stuff that it does), but I’m not pas­sion­ate about either Chrome or Fire­fox. Granted right when Chrome came out it was really, really fast, and a browser made by Google with Google Gears built in sign me up. Then Fire­fox released their new JavaScript engine and Chrome and Fire­fox essen­tially became the same speed and now, meh.

They are both good browsers, but both have become sim­ply a part of some­thing that I use for hours on end and essen­tially use to do pretty much every­thing I do, from my job, to my finances, to heck find­ing an apart­ment and buy­ing insur­ance is done through the web. The only appli­ca­tions I have open in my nor­mal day to day life is Fire­fox, Chrome, Post­box, iTunes, Pid­gin and Twhirl. Notice every­thing is built for and revolves around the web ulti­mately in that set, except for iTunes, mainly because music over the web is still a poor expe­ri­ence com­pared to play­ing my music.

I want a browser that adheres to stan­dards and is fast and reli­able. Both Chrome and Fire­fox and even Safari pro­vide that, what else does the aver­age per­son need in a browser?

Some­one go and rethink that ques­tion for a few months and then I might start car­ing again.