the tindog coffeehouse

When Mozilla released version 3.6 of its Firefox browser, I immediately installed it on my home computer. Overall, it’s a pretty nice update, but naturally a few of my add-ons didn’t work with it. (Par for the course.) One of those add-ons is IE Tab, which allows you to view a website using Internet Explorer while still in Firefox. Since I use that particular add-on pretty regularly, I decided to take another look at Google Chrome since the latest update of that browser, version 4.0, adds support for extensions such as AdBlock, Xmarks, and IE Tab.

Without question, Chrome has a lot of advantages. It’s fast, it’s more standards-compliant than Firefox, and each tab runs in its own process (thus allowing one to fail without taking down the whole browser). But even with the latest updates and extensions (Chrome’s versions of Firefox’s add-ons), it doesn’t really feel complete.

First, Chrome has always been a stripped-down browser, and this latest version is no exception. The simplicity is fine for basic browsing but becomes a severe annoyance if you plan on using it for any extended period of time. The lack of a native print button, the inability to add buttons or move them around, and the mandatory thumbnail page when creating a new tab are just a few of the nuisances. Some of the limitations, of course, can be remedied with third-party extensions, but not all them.

Second, while a lot of extensions are available, none of the ones I tried seemed as well-developed as their Firefox equivalents. IE Tab in Firefox, for example, allows you to configure which sites or domains will always open in an IE environment and allows easy switching back and forth with one click of a button. IE Tab in Chrome, however, has neither of those options. ForecastFox in Firefox displays the weather in the bottom status bar. In Chrome, you just get a button in the top toolbar that you have to click on for weather details. Xmarks, the popular bookmark syncing service, also didn’t quite deliver. Bookmarks would sync but would screw up the bookmarks on my home Firefox install, and even after multiple syncs, it never did work exactly right. And that seemed to be a common occurrence in my experience. While all of the extensions I tried worked to one degree or another, most felt clumsy and awkward.

The more I used Chrome, the more it reminded me of the contrast between Google’s Android platform and the iPhone. While Android has improved considerably since its initial release, it still lags pretty far behind the iPhone in terms of overall user experience, and the apps for the iPhone are far more numerous and generally better developed than those for Android. Such is the case with Chrome and its extensions versus Firefox and its add-ons; while Chrome continues to improve, it’s not nearly as polished as Firefox.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that it’s a matter of preference. I understand why Chrome is so popular, but in my opinion, Firefox is still the better browser.

Previously:
Giving in to Google
Internet Explorer 8: Faster but no Firefox