Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 2 Why Firefox Wins For This User
I do a lot of reading online. Some of it is for my freelance writing business, other times, it is research for my own projects like my saving and investing advice website, and other times, it just shows up in my RSS Feeds which I never used to read, but now read all the time because I like reading them on my phone (via Google Reader on Windows Mobile). Plus, I’m a reformed IT professional, and you can take the techie out of the computer world, buy you can’t take the computer world out of the techie.
Anyway, a lot of sites and feeds I read are starting to trickle out articles about why people are switching from Firefox to Google Chrome as their primary browser.
When I read the reasons why these people think that Chrome is better than Firefox, I realize that they don’t use their browsers like I do. They may think they are power-users, but until you’ve done 24 Google searches (still open in their tabs in case you still haven’t found what you need), opened 100+ sites, twenty or so online PDF files, clicked every one of the reference links at the bottom of eight or nine Wikipedia articles (Wikipedia is a good way to find sources, Wikipedia is not a good source for professional writers.) read through page 188 of a 533 page SEC public comments posting in order to find out just where the regulatory agency stands on what type of disclaimer is required in an investment related corporate email, all while still messing around on Facebook, Twitter, and Hulu, you don’t know what a power browser is.
Ironically, you don’t even have to push the browsers to advanced capabilities to see that Firefox is better than Google Chrome (at least for now.)
Why Firefox Is Better Than Chrome For Main Browser
When you are done running tests and calculating that Chrome loads a Javascript page in 1.834 seconds while Firefox takes 2.122 seconds, the choice comes down not to speed, but usability and functionality. There are several critical features that are missing in Google Chrome, either intentionally, or someone just hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
I’m not talking about playful little plug-ins and things like moon-phase calendars or digital clocks or skins. I’m talking about things that interrupt my workflow so dramatically, that it causes me to sit stunned for a few seconds while I try and figure out what the best way to proceed is. Do I work around it in Chrome, or do I wait forever for Firefox to load and copy and past the link over there?
Here are the Top Reasons Firefox is Better Than Chrome As a Default Browser
- File Handling – I don’t care if Chrome’s built-in download manager is better or not. Sometimes I don’t want to download the file (or technically, I want to download it in the background instead). PDF files come to mind. There are hundreds of PDF files that are linked to out there. In Firefox, it opens Foxit Reader and loads the file. I can scan it and decide whether to read it, save it, or get rid of it and move on. In Chrome, it downloads it, puts a button at the bottom of the screen and waits for me to decide what to do with it. That’s after it asked me where to save it. I had to create a temporary directory just so I have a place to put all of those little files that I have to fully download and store in Chrome, just so I can access it. I also get no choice to Open, Run, or anything else. You can’t get through 40 PDF files on a website by doing it this way.
- Google Updater – Yeah, I know, they finally pulled their head out and started doing it in a way that makes sense, but I spent so many months killing, deleting, closing, and stopping Google Update from starting automatically with Windows, that I don’t even know how to go back to letting it run. By the way, even if it doesn’t run all the time it still runs every single hour and doesn’t bother checking with you to see if now is a good time to update. If you are pushing a tight deadline and trying to download, proof, and re-upload some big files, too bad. Google Update will be wasting your bandwidth (and number of connections) downloading the upgrade from version 2.1.03.2 to 2.1.03.3, because we all know that is more important.
- No Print Preview – Seriously, how hard is this to code? There is nothing quite like printing out what you think will be 2 pages only to get 14 pages thanks to all the extra stuff that prints funny. I also hate that one extra line that prints on a new page. I never print without preview first, and Chrome doesn’t have one.
- Plug-ins – No Zotero, no default browser. The same people that used to say plug-ins were one of the main reasons Firefox was so much better than Internet Explorer, now say they don’t need them. Not me. Some of my plug-ins are optional, but plenty of my add-ons are not optional.
- Bookmark Tags – No tag support for bookmarks? I long ago passed the point where folders were sufficient to find my bookmarks efficiently, this is a deal killer.
Notice that I didn’t say anything about Ad-block Plus or NoScript or other Firefox add-ons that make browsing less annoying. If those are your main reasons for using Firefox, then by all means, switch over to Chrome. But, until I have usable bookmarks, usable printing, usable file handling, and my can’t-live-without-them add-ons, Chrome will be my secondary browser.
Chrome Is Faster
Don’t get me wrong. Chrome is faster, way, way, faster. The quicker start-up time alone is worth the extra resources I use up having another browser. When I need to check something out quickly, Chrome is my go to browser. But, when I’m settling in to get some real work done, it’s worth the wait to start up Firefox.
Firefox Close Button On Every Tab Minimum Width Glitch
I have installed and uninstalled so many plug-ins for Firefox that I long ago lost count. As of this writing I have around 35 installed and maybe 20 or so enabled. So, when I get a little glitch here or there in the Firefox interface, I usually figure it’s probably my fault and that one of my add-ons is causing it either intentionally (for the add-on, not for me) or because I configured, or didn’t configure, something that messed up whatever it was that I noticed.
However, I don’t just let it go without doing some troubleshooting.
Today, I stumbled across the solution to one of my major annoyances. I routinely go into Firefox’s about:config to ensure that my browser.tabs.closeButtons is set to 1 which means that there should be a X one each and every tab in Firefox so that you can close any tab you want with a single click. In other words, there is no need to select the tab in order to close it.
The catch is that even though that parameter was indeed set, and reset, to 1 every time, my close buttons seemed to disappear after I had been using Firefox for a while.
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
I’ve done a fair amount of reading about Firefox. Unfortunately, not everything out there is very good or very accurate. In particular, the numerous articles about how to make Firefox faster by adjusting about:config parameters are misleading at best, and untrue at worst.
Along the way, I read about setting your mimimum tab width in Firefox. The point is that by making it smaller, more tabs will fit across a single row. Google has made Title tags worthless by making every savvy webmaster fill them with keywords instead of a useful title. That means it really doesn’t matter how small your tabs are since most of the time, whatever text is displayed in the tab won’t be unique enough to distinguish one tab from another. So, like many others before me, I cranked the minimum tab width parameter down to 70 or 75 depending upon my mood.
It turns out, that on a tab that is too small, Firefox does not put an X to close the tab regardless of what the about:config browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting is. With a small setting, the browser determines that you want a smaller tab and that there is no longer any room for a close button.
In my Firefox installation, testing has revealed that a minimum tab width setting of 138 is required to always have a close button displayed no matter how many tabs you have open. That number may be substantially different for your installation because I do have some plug-ins that do things to my tabs like color them and allow me to close all tabs to the right, and so on.
If you want a close button on all of your tabs and you already have set your browser.tabs.closeButtons to 1, check your browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting. Try bumping it up to 140 or so and see if all of your tabs have close buttons now. Then, experiment with smaller numbers until you get the smallest tab size that will work. Then, it’s up to you to decide which you want more, smaller tabs, or easily accessible close buttons.
For me, I want that X on every tab all the time because sometimes I end up with dozens of tabs open while searching for some information, and once I find it, I just want to close all the other tabs about that topic fast and easy. That is, unless they are all grouped at the right end, in which case I can just Close All Tabs to Right.
Foxmarks Upgrades to Xmarks
Foxmarks is one of my favorite plug-ins for Firefox and quite frankly, was one of the reasons Firefox became my primary browser back in the day.
For those of you not familiar with Foxmarks, now Xmarks, it synchronizes your bookmarks across your Firefox browsers. Basically, you create a username and password and install the Foxmarks plug-in on one of your computers. Then, you install the Foxmarks plug-in on your other computers and setup the same username and password and then Foxmarks works in the background to keep your book marks in sync.
If you add a bookmark on your laptop, Foxmarks synchronizes that bookmark with the Foxmarks site and then when you use your desktop browser, it retrieves that bookmark and adds it to your Firefox bookmarks on your desktop browser.
Where it gets really powerful and useful is when combined with the Read It Later plug-in which allows you to quickly bookmark sites that you come across that you would like to read but don’t have time to look at right now. This saves you from creating some temporary bookmarks folder that fills up with bookmarks that you don’t remember what they are for. Since the Read It Later plug-in stores your pages to be read later as bookmarks, they get synchronized by Foxmarks too which means that when you find a great gaming page, but you are at work, you just mark it to be read later, and then when you get home, the link is waiting there in the your Later folder.
Upgrading to Xmarks
Recently Foxmarks added the ability to synchronize passwords between browsers as well, so when you click Remember Password inside Firefox for a site, Foxmarks takes that password and syncs it up with your other PCs which is awesome if you don’t always remember every password for every site. You can disable this feature if it makes you nervous.
I’m perfectly happy with how Foxmarks works, so I’m slightly nervous about an "upgrade" that downloaded this morning. It seems that Foxmarks is becoming Xmarks, in no small part because they want to support more browsers than just Firefox, which is fine.
However, they are adding in a new "discovery" tool which essentially jumps in when you do a Google search and adds an icon based on which 3 of the results from your search are the most bookmarked by all Firefox users everywhere. You can turn this off too, but the concern is that the development might go in that direction and turn what was a simple set it and forget it plugin that just plain worked into a bloated plug-in that makes Firefox use even more memory and resources.
So far, that isn’t the case, but I always worry when software I depend on adds a new dimension or goes off in another direction. After all, there was a reason I liked it the way it was and I might not like it as much if it changed.
The guy who developed Foxmarks seems pretty in touch with his user community and I have no doubt that he’d love to find a way to make some money off of his now free plug-in, so I hope that this all works out. Otherwise, the great thing about Firefox and other open software is that someone else will come along and offer a "Foxmarks Classic" extension that implements the software the way it was.
Until then, I think I’ll take the new Xmarks for a spin. Who knows, it might be really great.
