Opinions : FireFox Vs Google Chrome

Just wanted to get opinions from all of you.

Google Chrome or Firefox is a better and faster browser??

 

Better and faster are two different things.

Chrome Pros:
--Typically faster
--Has great extension support
--The most secure browser out of the box
--Fast release cycle with multiple channels
--Great support from help pages and forums

Chrome Cons:
--Extension support is not as great as firefox's.
--Adblocking is not as good as firefox's. You have to rely on a host file or some external 3rd party program to block ads.


Firefox Pros:
--Has the best extension support of any browser
--Has great customization support

Firefox Cons:
--Terribly insecure out of the box compared to chrome. It takes multiple extensions to even get close to Chrome's level of security.
--It's typically slower than Chrome (Yes, I'm sure I'll hear arguments here)

 

You've most definitely opened a big can of worms here. But generally, I would agree with Hungry Man assessments. Throw IE9 and Opera (incidentally, the two browsers I use) into the mix, and you have even more of a dilemma.

IE9
Pros
- Has the best hardware acceleration of the bunch
- Can be faster than Chrome/Opera/Firefox on certain pages (related to first point)
- Likely uses the least battery, if an adblocker is installed (related to first point)
- Best compatibility on the web (sites are designed with IE in mind)
- Many security patches from MS
Cons
- Most targeted browser in the world, and thus probably most vulnerable
- Very limited addons
- Very little customization

Opera
Pros
- Very customizable (a bit less than FF, more than Chrome--in general)
- Many features and great functionality
- Very secure: many great security features, and rarely if ever targeted
- Robust feature set for both newbies and expert users
Cons
- Little/no hardware acceleration (coming in 11.50, I believe)
- Relatively slow update cycle
- Poor compatibility (Opera adheres to web standards, which many sites unfortunately do not follow)
- Much smaller user community: fewer user addons, etc.

 

I would disagree that IE9 is the most vulnerable. I'd give that prize to firefox.

I agree with most of your points. A lot of things are case-by-case basis only so it's hard to give definitive answers.

edit: And what are Opera's security features? I don't know of anything other than its inherent obscurity.

 

I'm not sure where you get the idea that firefox is this insecure mess of code, but chrome and firefox tied for unbreakable as recently as 2 months ago. IE is (still) the most vulnerable browser just due to the sheer amount of things targeting it.

FF is indeed slower than chrome, because it doesn't use prefetching nearly as aggressively as chrome does, they both have upsides and downsides (disk writes, dns requests, ect ect). With 3 simple extensions installed on FF, you are quite secure against driveby malware or sidejacking (https everywhere, adblock, noscript) - FF does not have a sandbox feature like chrome.

I'm frowning at mozilla right now because they are copyi-- following chrome's inane release cycle numbering; I don't see the problem with ff 4.1.x or 4.5.x, but they are moving right up to big numbers and in a few years we will be sitting with chrome v33 and ff v26. However, I'll stick with FF for now because it does what I want and I do use several more useful addons that chrome simply does not offer.

 

I guess every browsers now days are getting better day by day.

I've read a few reviews about Chrome , and I totally agree with Hungry Man here. Sooner or later chrome will be outbeating FF. Can't really expect chrome to be bug free , overall Chrome is a much lighter browser then FF i believe.

But IE9 and Opera is kinda out of the box , users nowdays rarely use them , well to me anyways.

 

I'm not sure this is a correct statement. Savvy users may not use IE9 for many different reasons. Laymen and corporate users will lean toward the default in the OS, unless they care otherwise.

 

Pwn2Own is not a security benchmark. Firefox 4 has vulnerabilities... it was released with 3 critical ones if I recall. I believe pwn2own is only about 0days though and they didn't get any, Firefox also released a big security update right before the competition.

In terms of security it is easily the weakest link purely because of the lack of security methods implemented. You can use addons to beef up the security but I'm talking purely out of the box -- and even with addons it doesn't get to Chrome or even IE9's level.

IE9 may be targeted but Microsoft is addressing the security issues with tried and proven methods.

If someone asked me about staying secure and which browser they wanted to use I would recommend Chrome and if not I'd recommend IE9...

 

I made the switch over to Chrome after being a dedicated Firefox user for as long as I can remember. Best choice I've made, in terms of browsers.

Firefox became very slow, and would crash constantly on me.

Pretty much Chrome does everything I need it to, plus it looks good. Except the icon, that's horrible.

 

All I have to do is type in the first letter of the site I want to visit and it's BAM right there. So if I want to go to Flickr, all I do is type 'f' and it's already there for me to use.

 

All in the eyes of the beholder - so they say

What I use daily Firefox seems to fit the bill better than Google Chrome, and there are times I use ChromePlus (Google Chrome minus the privacy concerns)

cheers ...

 

I mainly use FF and Chrome (both run quick for me). I still use Opera when I feel like it.

 

Hey, your more than welcome........

 

I have Chrome and Firefox but truth be told I never use Chrome. I'm not entirely sure why I have it installed but I guess it's not hurting anything. Firefox in my opinion, is just a lot better. I get how Chrome is about .21s faster opening up, but I can live with that. All the extensions and customizations make Firefox feel so much more comfortable. In car terms, Firefox to me is a comfortable Lexus that you can get fully loaded (add-ons). Chrome is a....Kia with NOS. Only thing is, the Lexus (Firefox) is packing a 350hp engine anyway so whatever. Not sure what the point of Chrome is to be honest but I guess each to their own. In regards to security, man, if a hacker wants to get you, odds are, he's going to. If you're even semi-responsible, whichever browser you use isn't going to change anything between these browsers. And if you're really paranoid, Firefox has enough add-ons that will shut the heck down out of everything and anything. And it's just...better, man. So many small things that don't even come to mind just combine to make the experience that much better. Oh, and I can change the hack out of FF. I want this up or down, left or right, big or small....I can do it.

Chrome had three features I loved:
1. Paste and go into the address bar
2. Search directly from the address bar
3. Status-bar that hides after it's finished

FF 4 has added them all. hehe. Not sure what I think about this new release cycle. Kind of upset that they haven't fixed hardware acceleration font rendering in an entirely new version, but I guess just have to keep in mind every whole number really is a decimal... FF 5= FF 4.2. Thank you Google. Morons. Same goes with their beta crusade. Everything beta. Anyway.

 

i'm betting alot of chrome lovers haven't seen Firefox 4 in action...and by action, i mean using it as your primary browser for at least at a couple of weeks.

the speed difference is almost nil as long as you don't use more than 15 addons.

ps, firefox panorama. nuff said. there is simply no better way to manage 70+ tabs at once.


firefox is for tweakers. you can do FARRR more customization in FF than you can in chrome. This comes at the expense of speed of course(with a out-of-the-box speed deficit that gets bigger the more extensions you use).

chrome is for consumers. its highly efficient in every way out of the box. its menus are simple AND hidden from the user. It actively tries to give you the illusion of customization by allowing for some extensions while simultaneously distracting you by making sites run so well, you feel like that is enough.

ps, i'm not going to comment on security because i still have no clue how to get malware from the internet without torrenting :/

 

Illusion of customization? I don't think there's anything of the sort. There are almost no customizations of the UI.

As for customizations of the program itself, you've got a thousand different chromium builds + you can do a bit of customization in Chrome itself (cache size/ location/ about:flags/ under the hood.)

 

It has extension support but I'd hardly call it 'great'.


I would sum up the choice between Firefox and Chrome as that between customisation and speed.

Obviously it's not as simple as that and Chrome has some neat little features that other browsers do not but it simply doesn't have the scope to allow you to make it work exactly the way you want to.
Firefox gives you that choice and it's not exactly slow but having switched from Firefox to Chrome ( well, ChromePlus to be precise) recently, it's only then that you truly appreciate how much faster Chrome is.

Firefox 4 seems to be a decent step forwards in terms of speed but I still wouldn't say it was as fast as Chrome.

 

Chrome's extension support is pretty great, honestly. Better than Opera's or IE9's. It has tons of ports from firefox...

Firefox gives users more customizability of the UI. That is definitely the number one feature it has over Chrome.

Speed and security though? Well, speed is often debated -- most people don't realize that it's not a difference of 5ms anymore on modern web pages. Security isn't really debatable, you have to use multiple extensions/ third party softwares to get on Chrome's level.

 

I use Chrome and FF4 side-by-side. Most of the time I use Chrome because it feels faster in basic tasks. Firefox has the download and security addons.

If xmarks supported Opera, I'd use it more. I have it in my laptops, since the turbo mode works exceptionally well over 3G.

 

The extensions themselves just don't measure up to FF's, not by a million miles.

There are like 4 versions of Adblock and they're all crap, I actually have FF4 installed and most of the time I use it's AdBlock w/ Element Hiding Helper, then copy and paste the elements across into the Chrome version.
I've had to install two different extensions to take even the most basic control of how tabs are managed and I still haven't got anywhere near the control TabMixPlus offers in a single extension - not to mention it's brilliant session manager.

If I could've made FF4's address bar truly instant like Chrome's and changed the tabs UI to match, I doubt I'd ever have made the change.

 

I've read that the latest Firefox is now faster than Chrome, but I still prefer the latter. It's simpler and more elegant.

I still have great affinity for Firefox's add-ons, such as DownloadThemAll. And I'll continue to use both for the foreseeable future.

 

Again, where are you getting this idea that an out-of-box firefox is completely vulnerable to everything and chrome is far superior or immune to everything? Even though this is an opinion thread and some things like customization are fully up for debate, security vulnerabilities are not really opinion based, they are fact (or at least, proof of concept) based.

Chrome prefers to connect to major websites that offer https via https, but it actually doesn't force it - because unless the website is built to tell browsers to connect w/ https, chrome doesn't know the difference. The onus is on the website, not the users' browser choice.

Chrome offers a pseudo-sandbox that firefox does not. That's about the only difference I see between the 2 security-wise. I am not sure how effective chrome's sandbox actually is, though, since it will not tell you if that file you've downloaded from hotfile has weaponized jars, it will only contain the file until you let it out - MSE or some other AV is what will tell you that the file is infected. What difference does it make if MSE detects it in a sandbox or not if you don't open the file? One of the few situations I can see chrome's sandbox being a lifesaver is if you download malware, don't have an antivirus, and like to ignore any UAC or security warnings, AND like to open any file you dl right away without any kind of inspection... in which case, you'll need to assume that this person would be foolish enough to recover the file from out of the sandbox and do it all over again.

I'm going to quote something from an article I read a couple days ago:

 

I use FF primarily, although Chrome handles large GoogleDocs better (which I have to use a lot for school).

I'd use Chrome more, except I get annoyed that you can't disable saving your history (seems like such a basic feature, Incognito is overkill for me) and accessing recently closed tabs is more convenient with Firefox.

 

Some of you are either too passionate about Chrome or are trolling. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Use what you like, and if you're smart, you'll look into the competition from time to time.

Don't think you're ahead of the pack because you use Firefox or Chrome or Opera or anything else for that matter.

Thinking what you're using now is fine enough, and choosing to brush off the competition is what I see every single day from IE users who use IE 6. If you follow that thinking Firefox or Chrome or any browser you are brand myopic about will become the next IE 6 of the web.

Chrome exploit for Windows passes every security hurdle - The H Security: News and Features

 

I use Chrome.
I mainly used it because until a few months ago, I was using a 8 yr old Dell Desktop (Intel Celeron, 512 MB ram, Win XP, integrated Intel graphics).

Firefox was super slow [no extensions], IE 7 was even slower [no extensions]. The only browser that had reasonable speed on my old system was Google Chrome. It allowed for multi-tabs without having significant slow downs in my resources. Thus, I still favor Chrome over others. Though I still use IE for certain sites that need supported browsers.

 

Ok , so I just downloaded Chrome , and wanted to try and see which browser runs faster , I'd say they are both around the same , and you don't expect chrome to be bug free . for now chrome is no way near FF , in general , of course chrome doesnt use as much memory to run . giving it a few more months to see if chrome can be at par with FF ?

 

not true at all anymore. by now, it's about on par, and removes ads instead of just hiding them before having them loaded.

i can install extensions without having to restart my browser. i see this as rather great. firefox 4 promised that and still can't handle it.

customizability (mainly ui) is not comparable to firefox. other than that, extension support is great. imho better than firefox (as they can't really bog down chrome no matter how much you have). they are more "web extensions" than "browser extensions". but with a good browser, "browser extensions" aren't that needed.

 

@Hakira: Chrome does not sandbox files you download. It sandboxes tabs and the javascript renderer as well as plugins and extensions. It seems self explanatory as to why this is a pretty big security feature. I'm super tired but I can write more later.

edit: Davepermen -- The developer of ABP (same guy for chrome and for firefox) is the first to admit that the chomve version has short comings.

 

after using firefox since its first release, i finally jumped ship to chrome this year. i was just absolutely sick of it being a memory hog (not releasing memory after closing tabs)and then getting slow and finally crashing, not to mention the ridiculously bad flash plugin.
i did try the latest version and i still faced these issues so i stuck with chrome

chrome feels faster, gives me about 500mb (!!)more ram free than firefox under the same circumstances.

cons are i miss the url dropdown box, and there is no way to properly scroll through tabs. when you have a lot of them open, only the icons remain making it pretty useless. thankfully after installing verticaltabs extension it solved this issue or it would have been a deal breaker for me

 

it still has SOME short comings. but most are by now fixed. the ones that are now in existence are about very special cases. for the typical ads, they are both on par by now.

 

Yup. I agree. But there are ways around it -- although even when an ad does make it through it'll at least hide it.

I do prefer the host file method though.

 

i hate the host file method (happens to be mostly about rerouting to 127.0.0.1, which is not that useful if you do webdev.. so every ad you see is just your own homepage. depending on development stage, that can actually kill pages ).

and having just a hostfile is definitely annoying. all that useless whitespace. i don't hate ads for their existence. i hate them for taking away useful space.

 

You can use pxlserve to remove the space. I don't bother. I dislike the ads because they slow down the page and are a huge security issue.

I keep a host file on my router and a separate host file on my PC.

 

Oh dear, I thought chrome also sandboxed the tmp files (wasn't sure on downloads, but thought it did tmp). If that's the case, firefox added out-of-process plugins a while back, but I don't think ff does anything for javascript (need noscript for that). Chrome's "sandbox" is pretty misleading then, as it really isn't a sandbox at all It's more of a compartmentalization / module approach, and when you say it like that not only does it make more sense it does seem like a wiser approach to take, so thumbs up there. It just isn't a sandbox

@afhstingray
chrome uses less ram because it does more disc writes and runs seperate, smaller processes. On the flip side, firefox is known to have a minor memory leak; pick your poison.

 

Firefox's separation of plugins isn't nearly on the same level as Chrome's for a few reasons. For one thing they're all in one process. For another they aren't sandbox'd.

 

why is more disc writes a problem for something like a browser?

also yes, im including the total memory of all the small processes... and its still less so thats a positive i think?

 

Yep, I know; the difference between the 2 is that chrome will simply terminate the problem tab, while firefox will kill everything and bring up the "oops restore which tabs?" page on restart. Like I said, chrome's module approach is the smarter one to take, though I suspect it has a hand in the crashing issues.

afh, I do think chrome has a smaller memory footprint overall (even with the little ones added up) too. It comes down to disc writes vs memory leaks - people with SSD's typically frown at things that are constantly writing to discs (ironically if you use an SSD you won't feel a difference between ff and chrome) and on HDD's they can in theory degrade performance or reliability over the years. FF's memory leaks have been haunting it for a while, they are pretty minor but again, if you keep your 100 tab window open all day long you will def feel/see it.

 

i'm just wondering why restarting is such a big issue for people. the ONLY downside i can find is the fact the flash videos get destroyed.

i mean, if you had to restart after every single plugin, that would be annoying as hell. that's not the case though.

the thing with a good browser is that its not good for everyone. just like anything else in life.

 

it's not a big thing. just a thing that shows clearly how much superior chrome's core design is.

it's not a big thing having to restart your os on every driver installation, too, right? still it's much nicer to not have to. etc..

chrome shows how much you can really seperate each part and make it individually running (which is the reason an addon does not need a restart). firefox is still very much all in one, and one faulty page can take down the full browser (which happens a LOT in firefox). so do addons really run in the browser itself => slow start of firefox due to the addons. for chrome, it's "i start, and lets see what addons i can do then".

it, in essense, shows how modular, virtualized, each-on-it's-own it is. and that, as is well known, is one of the big security features of chrome.


so no, it's not a big hazzle. but it is one. and it shows the lack of modern design firefox has.

 

For myself, at the moment firefox beats Chrome just by a bit simply because I can tweak the FF appearance & screen-space footprint via userChrome.css.
Currently tabs + bookmarks + urlbar + function icons (back, reload etc.) + extension icons all together take up only 59 pixels total. So even more minimalistic than Chrome without losing any features I need.

 

does anyone know if there is a extension for chrome that is similar to flashgot?

 

every driver i've installed in windows 7 gives me the option of delaying the restart, which means i download and install EVERYTHING in one go and one restart later, the system is done.

now, i don't THINK this was the case in earlier windows. In any case, its not exactly fair to compare to outdated versions....

this was an issue in 3.5/.6. Not so much in FF4 and after(although the final release of FF4 had its own .... issues. enough to make me want to go to chrome until i downloaded a properly working aurora version).

 

Both browsers are really good in there own right. It all comes down to preference really. I prefer Chrome over firefox because it has a better UI in my book and gets the job done.

 

Either are miles better than explorer. Used FF for ages but been using Chrome for the last couple of years. Shame it still feels like a beta.

 

I thought the exact same thing. I still you Chrome, but IE9 is actaully on par now. If you dont believe me, download it. Coming from a Chrome user since it first came out.

 

Between the two programs, I would have to say that FF has better extension support than Chrome simply because it was there first and has a larger pool of people who contribute to it.

I was using Chrome Plus for some time, but recently switched to IE9.
I wanted to give it a try, and with proper tracker protection that allows actual ad-blocking, I find it just as good as other Chrome and FF (asifr from Ad-block, I have no real need for other extensions), and I must say it's working just fine.
I still keep Chrome Plus on the side-line just in case though.

 

I used to use FF almost exclusively back in college, and then IE7 won me over for a while since it seemed to work better than FF when it came out. I went back to FF for a while around 2007 until it started giving me too many compatibility and speed issues, at which point I made my way to Chrome and I've never looked back.

I agree that Chrome's got some issues, though - fewer useful extensions and the lack of a good download manager (to my knowledge) keep it a couple clicks shy of ideal. I use IE9 on occasion for DAP support and one particular Flash app that occasionally lags on Chrome, but it's mostly Chrome for me, though I'm hardly scientific in my reasoning.

 

I don't know whether the machine matters, but Chrome is significantly faster on mine.

 

People literally still use Firefox as their main browser?

Wow.

 

I still do
Chrome is snappier but I feel cozy on FF lol.

On a side note, Chrome and Firefox should standardize which one goes first:
Open link in new window
Open link in new tab

Always gets me.