Experiences Switching from Firefox to Chrome

For a few months now I have joined the bandwagon and switched from Firefox to Chrome as my browser of choice. I have been using FF(Firefox) since its release (late 2004). Before that it was Mozilla/Netscape, and before that Mosaic, i.e no IE.

And I’m not alone. Looking at the latest aggregated stats we can see that Firefox’s growth, for the first time since its release, has started to show signs of decline. A quick glance at the graph and it is evident why. Its because Chrome’s share is growing. Its now the “official” number 3 browser behind IE(Internet Explorer) and FF. Bear in mind that analysing browser share is not an exact science.

There are numerous articles in the blogosphere trying to explain as to why this is happening. I will just lay out one or two points that I feel contribute to this shift.

Understanding the audience

Firefox users have always been tech savvy. They saw a product that a) Was technological superior in almost every aspect when compared IE , and b) open source, and non-MS. The decision wasn’t very difficult.

Fast forward to 2010. Chrome vs Firefox. Both open source, although with different licenses. Firefox is based on Gecko engine as opposed to WebKit. All this is too technical for the masses, and might influence around 0.5% of the end-users.

I believe that there are three reasons behind the shift. 1) Google’s penetration, 2) Chrome’s “Speed”, and 3) Chrome’s new-cool kid status.

1) Google’s Penetration

You really can’t use the Internet and not know that there is something out there called Chrome. Weather you search for something, use google maps, or even try to upload some pictures, you will be informed. It reminds me of Microsoft’s IE Antitrust issues. The nutshell was that Microsoft IS the desktop operating system market, and by packaging an internet browser that is tightly build into the operating system architecture is an unfair advantage to competitors. If you believe that Google is the internet search market, (90% of people worldwide do) then just CTRL+R Microsoft with Google.

2) Speed

Personally, this was the tipping point. Chrome is just faster than FF at least for me, and at least for now. One of the very first things that I do in the mornings is open up all my bookmarks under the “News” folder. It loads around 15 to 20 websites in tabbed view. I have been doing this for about a year in my PC and the cache/cookies numbers started to grow and grow. Firefox needed around 15 to 20 seconds to completely load all the pages. Chrome needs about half of that.

Mind you, this is very subjective. I know that Chrome hasn’t got to deal with around 1 years worth of history/cache/cookies and preferences. To be completely objective you would have to set up a test environment on freshly formatted PCs/Images and start a test-scenario and benchmark from there.

3) Cool kid

Sometimes people just want to try out something new. And if that thing is “better” or even “slightly worst” that the old one they stick to it.

What I enjoy and what I miss

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I frequently use Chrome’s “close to the right” tab feature. I also use the “Reopen closed tab”. I like Chrome’s minimalistic UI, for example the fact that there is no status bar by default, and links are displayed only when you hover above one. I like the download manager. Well to be honest I hated it at first. But then I realised that it removed clutter from my Desktop, cutting down on all these download popups. Also another feature that I really like is the single typing entry for both URLs and searching the web. You can also do other fancy stuff there. Try typing “chrome://history/” in your address bar.

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However, there are some areas that in my day-to-day tasks Chrome cannot compete with FF: Firebug and Spellchecking.

Firebug, for the non web-developers, is the defacto debugging tool for web applications. If I only had to choose two things to develop web applications I would first choose Firebug and then the editor of my choice (which is Notepad++). Once you get used to its functionality Firebug can dramatically cut down production time. But wait. Doesn’t Chrome offer a build in functionality similar to Firebug ? The answer is yes, its “Inspect Element” on the Developer Tools Package. However the key word here is similar. It just doesn’t quite match up to Firebug.

Spellchecking in Chrome, compared to FF, is a nightmare. As a Greek I spend a good amount of my time writing in the Greek language. I need to be able to spell check both Greek and English simultaneously. I might write up an email using both Greek and English text. And I want that email to be free of spelling errors. Thats a bit difficult in Chrome. Chrome doesn’t support multiple simultaneous dictionaries. You can only spell check one language at a time. So each time I switch from English to Greek or visa-versa, I have to right click-> and select the correct language. What’s more troublesome is that Chrome doesn’t spell check text that is already there. It only spell checks what you type. Try this example: Go to your favorite webmail, or in any area in a webpage that you can write up some comments or text. Start writing something, then copy it. Paste it to your favorite text editor, misspell a word, and then copy and paste it back to the browser. Chrome will not catch the misspelled word. You can also try this: write something misspelled in Greek with the English dictionary enabled. Then realise that you have the wrong dictionary and enable the Greek one. The misspelled word will NOT be caught.

What are your thoughts about Chrome? Have you made the switch? Are you waiting for your favorite extension to be migrated to Chrome? Have some of your Firefox troubles been resolved in the latest evolution of the browser (FF4)?

Post your insights!
Iraklis Mathiopoulos