I was a Firefox Fan since 1.4. the tabs download manager and speed made me fall in love and drop IE immediately! But few years later came along Chrome, with better integration with google accounts, faster and adding features constantly made me do the switch in 2009. Since then I have used Chrome as main browser and Firefox for testing purposes.
Yesterday, tired of memory consumption of Chrome I decided to give it a try to old good Firefox.
I tested using Ubuntu Linux 16.10. Chrome Version 54.0 and Firefox 50.0.
Better Chrome than Firefox
Many small details that makes browsing a more pleasant experience.
- Much faster than Firefox at least the feeling while browsing
- Better scrolling experience, on firefox was strange slow and blocking if there was media playing.
- Minimalism as design, less clutter smaller borders… looks cleaner
- You can select a single word when clicking
- Option after selecting a url Go To Site
- Scroll on tabs with mouse
- Native cast extension
- Many more extensions than firefox.
- Better auto filling forms.
- Paste without format.
- Better integrated on Linux, at least when you move from tab to window is lot more smooth.
- Better bookmark system.
Better Firefox than Chrome
I found some stuff and small details I liked more and that Chrome should really improve.
- Memory consumption, seems is more or less half of what Chrome was consuming
- Addons: many work on mobile and desktop
- Mobile: The sync seems to work slightly better
- Readability, love the button to remove the clutter similar to instapaper
- Personalization, change what to display in a simple way
- Development tools, they have improved here a lot, they are similar, but integration seems better on firefox.
- Better password manager, you can put a master password and faster.
- Privacy: there’s plenty of configurations related to this and seems they take it really serious.
- Better settings page. More clear and organized.
To improve in both
- Speed, still seems that when the browser needs to render a file that is slow or not available the browser gets “frozen”
- Memory, although seems all of them are working on this… it’s not good to use 2Gb of memory just with 4 tabs opened…
- Mobile sync, should be immediate
- Better password manager; allow to share pass etc.. without using an addo