Recently, I wrote about why Firefox is better than Chrome in a head-to-head browser comparison between Firefox 3.5 vs. Google Chrome 2. In the end, it basically came down to certain specific features that I just cannot live without because I use them on a daily basis to increase my productivity.
However, I do switch back and forth between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox a lot. In doing so, I have developed a list of things that I wish Firefox did that Chrome already does. For the most part, these are little things that make surfing the web faster or easier, rather than make or break requirements. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t really like to see these Google Chrome features show up in the next version of Firefox.
Chrome Better Than Firefox Features
The biggest one here has to be speed. You have to give it to Google and their open-source browser project Chromium. What they have put together is hands down the fastest web browser. Each browser developer out there from Microsoft, to Opera, to Apple’s Safari, all have specific tests that they construct to showcase their browser’s speed. But, when it comes to real-world browsing speed, Chrome is undeniably the fastest.
Where Internet browsing surfing speed really counts is in a user’s ability to get to the Internet and then do what they need to do without having to wait for the browser program to load or refresh, or whatever. Start the timer when you click to run the program and stop the timer when your favorite website or homepage has finished loading and nothing comes close to Chrome’s speed regardless of which carefully chosen website the developer wants to use.
The reason is that Google’s Chrome browser has the fastest start-up speed. True, it cheats a little bit by displaying the interface and giving control to the user before it is actually ready to do anything productive (it keeps loading in the background), but even if you account for that extra boot up time, Chrome is still the fastest to start.
Firefox, on the other hand, is a NIGHTMARE to start-up, especially if you purposely left a bunch of tabs open to automatically reload the next time you started Firefox. Here is the rest of the list. (I do know that some of these things can be done by plug-ins or add-ons for Firefox, and that is one of the great things about Firefox, but, frankly, I already have a TON of plug-ins loaded. I’d like to start cutting down on the number of Firefox add-ons I have, not increase them.)
Things I Wish Firefox Did More Like Chrome
- Load Faster
- Search from the Address Bar – It’s awesome, but it doesn’t do this.
- Paste and Go in the Address Bar – Nothing has saved me more keystrokes.
- Incognito style privacy – I get why Firefox does privacy mode the way it does, but I really like being able to have a private session going concurrently with a normal browsing session. Getting to choose between the two types would be ideal.
- One Tab = One Process – For research purposes, sometimes I right-click a dozen or more search results before I go look at what opened up in those tabs. Sometimes one of those websites is junk and ends up hanging the whole smash. In Chrome, I open the task manager find the garbage site and shut it down without even looking at in. In Firefox I have to wait until I get back control and then hunt down the offending site myself.
How about you? What features from Chrome would you like to see in Firefox?