How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users | Hacker News Reader

How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users

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42 pointsEGreg72 comments

I've been using Chrome as my browser for almost a couple of years now. I switched from firefox for basically one reason.

The browser is fast. Blazing fast. Starts-faster-than-notepad-while-my-system-is-still-settling-down fast.

I don't like how tabs get obscured if you have too many open. And there are some crashing bugs (I'm running the developer channel) but I still prefer it to any other browser.

There are some other nice features it has:

1) Silent updates that don't ask you questions. One day I'll click on the bookmark organizer and find that its been revamped completely since the last time I saw it. One day the tools menu has new items in it. I keep getting improvements pushed down as and when they are released and I've never had to notice it or take any action on it.

2) Automatically registers search engines whenever you search with it.

3) Syncs across multiple machines. Re-arranging the bookmarks on my Mac show up on my Windows system the next time I open Chrome on it.

That said, I still keep Firefox around as a container for Firebug. The chrome developer tools are nice but not on the same level as Firebug.

Firebug and LiveHTTPHeaders are basically the only reason I keep Firefox around these days.

Print preview is still missing from Chrome. It's the only reason I keep FF around (to make sure meeting agendas fit in one page, and I will adjust the zoom until they do).

The search engine registration feature is fantastic. I do a ton of searching all day on various sites and when I ever have to use firefox, I find myself start typing en.wiki-- hitting tab and remembering that firefox still has quite a bit of friction in the search interface.

I recently switched back to Firefox from a two week test drive of Chrome, reasons:

* I don't like how the display of a lot of tabs are handled (dozens of really small unreadable tabs)

* No NoScript (found one extension that didn't work very well)

* It doesn't feel that much faster with dozens of open tabs

* I prefer FF's interface

* Uncertainty about what data is shared with Google

Integration with Google's other services is not a selling point for me.

I now have an "Open in Chrome" item in my context menu for opening Planet Wars replays.

You don't have to use Chrome, Chromium works as well and I don't believe it shares data with Google.

Also while I'm not a huge fan of lots of small unreadable tabs, I'm not really a fan of scrolling tabs either, it just seems so slow. I typically just group like tabs into their own windows and it isn't really much of an issue anymore.

The only reason I don't use Chrome is because of the Google info sharing. Chromium is unclear as to weather it actually shares data or not. I believe at one point there was a bug where it was definitely connecting to googles servers. I believe they fixed it, but it was enough to keep me on Firefox.

Completely agree, specifically with these items:

* I don't like how the display of a lot of tabs are handled (dozens of really small unreadable tabs)

I wish Chrome had something like Tree Style Tabs (vertical tab panel on the left).

* It doesn't feel that much faster with dozens of open tabs

For me, it feels much, much slower when you have 30 tabs open - which are all visible because of Tree Style Tabs.

If I need to look at one website quickly and FF isn't open, I'll use Chrome. Otherwise, it's all Firefox.

If you run the dev channel version of Chrome, you can enable vertical tabs by browsing to about:labs and switching it on.

Re: Uncertainty about what data is shared with Google, for OS X users Little Snitch ( http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html ) is an eye-opening (and quite possibly alarming) way to see just how much data an application is sending out from your computer. Chrome is very "chatty."

I do not know the names of equivalent software for *nix or Windows. Does anyone else?

Chrome actually does have a method of blocking Javascript. It might still be in the beta channel for now, but if you go to Options->Under the Hood->Content settings, there is a Javascript tab that lets you disable javascript except for whitelisted sites.

Yes, I found that option. That part of Chrome is just not as mature as NoScript and Chrome doesn't offer me enough in other respects to ignore it.

One thing I find absolutely annoying in FireFox is that its always bugging me about updating either the browser or its extensions. Chrome does this all in the background and just works.

Wow, someone who doesn't complain about and actually prefers "forced" auto-updates. I never thought I'd see a day like this.

("forced" intentionally wrapped between quotation marks.)

I know, crazy eh? I think its silly that the default for most software applications is to ask the user about a software update. I think its safe to say that a majority of users want to be running the latest software, so the default should be to opt-out of software updates. I wish my iOS devices would auto-update apps instead of bugging me about it.

I get it, there are edge cases like an update needs to restart the computer, the Terms of Service change on it, etc. so maybe those would notify the user. Also, obviously IT departments would need to turn this stuff off.

Seriously, software vendors need to understand that today its a sensible default to just auto-update, but leave the door open for those who don't want that.

What I mean is that when Mozilla announced auto-updating people were crying all over the place about being "forced" to upgrade even when they don't want to and about privacy concerns.

Related, I like that Chrome doesn't do this on Debian-based Linux systems, but instead uses the normal apt update mechanism. Seems like it fits expectations on each platform reasonably well.

Mozilla is moving toward this by working on silent background updates (just for Windows users at the moment: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180272/Mozilla_plans...) and by eliminating startup dialogs of all kinds: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/Eradicate_Startup_...

They know about the problem and are working to fix it.

Great! I thought I read something about that somewhere. The dialogs were getting out of hand.

Now if Apple would borrow a page from Chrome and MSFT to auto-update my OS X and iOS apps...

> They know about the problem

I consider silent, automatic updates to be a HUGE problem.

I imagine they'll provide a configuration option for users to choose which they prefer, either in the Prefs menu or about:config.

I agree though, I prefer seeing update notifications popup at startup or anytime for that matter, than have it run silently in the background.

I started off being uncomfortable that I was using Chrome more and more. But it is a lot of little things that make it better. I'm on the dev channel, and some things might break, but having quick patches and updates is awesome.

Three things are holding me back to fully switching over:

- Awesome bar - its awesome

- Web Inspector <<<<< Firebug

- '/' to start searching (unless its there and i just dont know about it)

edit: formatting

Yeah, those things plus the Delicious extension keep me on Firefox.

Also, Chrome's "restore open tabs after a crash" feature is flaky. I use a lot of Chrome's "create application shortcut" feature, and it seems that if the first Chrome process I open after a crash is an application shortcut, it irrevocably forgets about the other tabs I had open.

Agree on awesome bar, but switched anyways, primarily because of the UX around closing tabs. (Chrome makes sure that the X stays over the cursor) and the search / url bar being one text box.

I've found that the built in inspector is sufficient for me on Chrome, and I love the resource monitoring.

'/' to searching is a big one for me but have adjusted back to CTRL-F I understand that there are 'vim' bindings now for chrome in some extension but haven't bothered installing it.

Vimium: http://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgnh...

I find this to be the perfect browser experience. It enables a lot of the VIM key bindings without altering the browser's regular settings. Meaning, I can still use the mouse just fine.

/ works for find. j,k for moving up down.

I use Chrome at work and FF everywhere else. Chrome is bloody fast.

But, FF keywords and awesome bar are so much better than what Chrome does. Totally miss '/', and ctrl-u to view source. An extension to bring those back would make me 37% happier!

Next version of FF claims big speed improvements. And since they've delivered on speed and memory improvements in the past I'm hopeful. I'll probably be switching back to FF only when that's out.

FWIW, Ctrl+u works as View Source in Chrome! Sadly, / doesn't do anything.

For me, Chrome wins purely on speed. Like the article says, "it [Chrome] feels faster, and that's all that matters." Once in a while I need to use Firefox to test something, and it just feels painfully slow in comparison.

Ironically, for me Chrome loses on speed. I intentionally use somewhat underpowered tools for development. The danger is accidentally building something that runs fine on my system but that drags for users, i.e. the Crysis effect. Until the whole world uses Chrome, I can't target that level of performance.

That's a good point. I was simply speaking from a usage standpoint, not for development. Also, I suspect you're talking about javascript speed -- I was mainly addressing non-javascript rendering. Chrome feels basically instant, while Firefox's rendering takes an extra 300-500ms.. just enough to feel really sluggish.

I switched to Chrome relatively recently and I love it however there are two things I really don't like:

* Inconsistent pinned tabs behaviour. A month ago, when I closed a pinned tab, it's favicon would remain, and I could click the favicon to reopen it. I loved this. Also, it would retain pinned tabs when I reopened the browser. Now, however, the "close but retain favicon" behaviour has disappeared, and it only sometimes remembers my pinned tabs between browser restarts, but I don't know why it's inconsistent.

* I detest the search bar's automatic handling of certain terms. For example, if I want information about a Google API, I may start typing "google maps api" but as soon as I finish typing "google" it turns my entry into an automatic search of Google, followed by the terms. But searching for Google for "google maps api" is not the same thing as searching Google for "maps api". It does this for all sorts of stuff.

Have you tried a question mark at the start of your query? (i.e. ?google maps api)

Thanks for the tip, works great!

I don't really get why Chrome is so exciting. OK, it uses the GPU to render pages. That's fine, but that's never the bottleneck for me; my CPU is done rendering pages long before it gets the next byte from the painfully-slow web app that I'm connected to.

What we really need is GPU acceleration for Arc...

> OK, it uses the GPU to render pages

? It actually doesn't -- not release versions at any rate. Are you confusing Chrome with IE9 or Firefox 4?

Latest development releases of chromium support this (see http://blog.chromium.org/2010/09/unleashing-gpu-acceleration...)

For me it's mostly just the combined search & url field. Once you get used to that, anything else feels awkward.

In Firefox,

(1) View >> Toolbars >> Customize

(2) Drag your search box out of the bar

(3) Okay

(4) Go to any search engine. For example, go to google.

(5) Right-click in the search box, and choose "Add Keyword for this search"

(6) Give it a friendly name. For a google search keyword, I might suggest "g".

Now, when you want to search in Firefox's single URL bar, you can type "g cute cat pictures". Add the "cpan" search keyword for the search.cpan.org box, and in the same bar, you can type "cpan Moose". Want to define a word? Set up a keyword for the box at dictionary.com (Would "d" work for you?).

Also, Firefox has NoScript and supports the latest version of JavaScript (Chrome is years behind).

Never knew about that one... that's awesome. Many many thanks!

The search keywords is the main reason I can't get used to Chrome. After years of typing g <search> or wiki <search>, I'm having a lot of trouble readjusting.

You can use keywords in Chrome: go to Options > Basics > Default search > Manage, pick a search engine, click Edit, and enter your keyword. It's a few more steps than in Firefox, but at least it doesn't clutter your bookmarks.

I think Chrome one-ups them, actually. It keeps track of search engines you visit, so you can go there now and fill out ones you've already used without browsing anywhere.

Chrome appears to automatically add keywords (the site name by default) when it detects something searchable... good to know.

You can do this with Firefox currently. You can remove the search box from the UI using "View > Toolbars > Customize..."

Any term you type into the URL bar that Firefox doesn't recognize as a URL will default to a google search. I actually edited this in about:config to default to a secure google search rather than a basic google search.

If you want to get more advanced, you can set keywords to perform custom searches. I have mine set so that typing "w <string>" will search for the Wikipedia article. I use several others "i <string>" for image search, "n <string>" for news, "d <string>" for definitions, and so on. They're easy to set up.

I go a little bit further and also drag up the URL bar (and a few buttons) into the Menu toolbar and then disable the navigation toolbar.

Chrome is definitely awesome, but I've been using FF a lot more recently because Vimperator is better than Vimium.

Chrome still can't seem to get mouse gestures right. I don't care if a page is "protected". I don't care what platform limitations are in place. I just want the same experience, regardless of where I am or what OS I'm on. Right now siphon+xmarks+firefox comes a lot closer to that than chrome.

Past that I think it's a great browser. But until the day comes that I never have to click the back or close buttons, it won't be my browser of choice.

I think it's a fools errand to try to make one browser for every single type of web browsing user on the planet. I use the browser a lot differently - web development, checking HTTP headers, etc - than my girlfriend does - browsing facebook and looking up clothes on the Anthropologie website.

Firefox + Firebug, Web Developers Toolbar + all my other extensions make it a wonderful browser for doing we development, but makes it _terrible_ (and slower) for doing casual browsing...which is why I'm not writing this comment in Firefox :)

The iPad does this exceptionally well. It did a great job of showing that while the laptop platform is a superset of all iPad functionality, it was the actual _platform_ (bigger hardware, short(er) battery life, needing mouse/trackpad, etc) that got in the way from the best user experience of consuming content.

There are a lot of things I really love about chrome, and it is very tempting to make the switch. I would bet in a few years it is as large as or larger then IE.

Im not switching from firefox, but from Opera. I haven't been able to use Firefox as my default browser without being annoyed to hell for some time.

However I still feel chrome is not as polished as Opera but I still enjoy using chrome and there are so many things that are better then Opera. However there are still 2 game breakers that are keeping me from switching to chrome.

Built in RSS reader - I don't want another program to handle RSS for me. This is a key thing keeping me on opera and I really hope they don't try to force you to go to Google Reader.

Mouse Gestures - Every plugin for this sucks. They are awful, slow, inaccurate and annoying. Big time game breaker for me.

They missed the main reason I switched to chrome. I constantly had issues where firefox had a (memory leak?) that slowed my whole computer down, usually causing me to kill the task couple days.

I love the extensibility of FF, and aza's usability contributions, but I can't live repeatedly restarting a browser in a world of webapps.

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried FF 4 yet, but experienced the same issues last spring when I tried to switch back to FF for treeview tabs)

(Disclaimer 2: I suppose there's ways to workaround it - searching led me to this: http://blog.skdev.net/2009/02/12/how-to-fix-firefox-memory-l... )

Sounds like history repeats itself. New Microsoft - Google - takes on Netscape browser (Netscape 5 -> Mozilla -> FireFox).

"Integration with Google Services .... When Chrome OS comes out with a stable release, you'll be able to sync your full computing experience by just logging in with your Google account. It's not there yet, but it's all part of where Chrome is going. " sounds strangely familiar to the strategy of close integration of IE into Windows successfully played many years ago.

Competition and greed is good. And current state of browsers only confirms it. In result we'll have even better and faster browsers :)

Chrome, so far, is the only browser I can keep open with a bazillion tabs for days, weeks, MONTHS without seeing my system take a slow, deadly, performance hit. I'm sorry I didn't start using it sooner.

Very true. Indeed, I switched from Firefox to Chrome after Firefox hanged yet again with N tabs open, and I just couldn't figure which one it was and simply close that one. On chrome this never happened, and I never had to restart the browser.

I've actually switched the other way, from Chrome and Chromium to Firefox. I used to think FF was compartively slow and clunky too, but then something strange happened: I discovered Vimperator a few months ago.

I don't how Vimperator does it, or whether it's just the a placebo effect of sorts, but installing it on FF 3.6 on Linux made FF feel as or more responsive and stable than Chrome and Chromium. It's now my primary browser & I'm lovin' it.

Power users love things that sync. Synchronization means you can work from any computer and expect the same basic environment.

I've gotten hosed by Sync before. I switched OSes not realizing I was also switching to an older version of Chrome. In the process of syncing I lost a few months of bookmarks (it looked like all the bookmarks I had saved with the newer Chrome were gone).

So I'm using Xmarks now.

One bug that I've seen that is not developer friendly is that you need to run with --enable-ipv6 on Linux to be able to access 127.0.0.1 or localhost when you don't have a network/internet connection. It's especially annoying that it gives a name lookup error when trying to access 127.0.0.1... IT'S AN IP ADDRESS!

I love Chrome because it uses the screen real-estate so efficiently. It's essential on a netbook.

The only thing I miss is "/" starting search. There's an extension for it, but it interferes with other things often enough I had to turn it off.

FTA: > consolidating the search box and address bar seems so obvious

I know that Mozilla's engineers would love to do that, but the search box is their revenue model. Google pays a lot of money for that box to be there.

AdBlock Plus is holding me to Firefox... I have disabled check updates in firefox and do it myself once in a while. This has kept me sane otherwise it is too annoying and load time is high.

Firefox 4 will update addons automatically.

Chrome has an AdBlock extension too. It works great for me.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj...

The Chrome/Safari adblock has an extremely crap UI compared to Firefox adblock if you ever wanna add your own blocking rules.

I use Ad Thwart. It's been pretty good.

As a Flash game developer, I find that Flash games run substantially faster in Chrome because of the way that Flash is integrated. By a factor of 2x in some cases.

Firefox has firebug and greasemonkey but I'm probably using a different definition of power user.

The author of Greasemonkey works on the Chrome team now (he's also an HN user, I believe). So pretty much all Greasemonkey scripts work in Chrome by default (they're extensions).

Also, have you tried the Chrome Developer Tools? They rival Firebug. You might like them even more.

A while back there were a few things that a number of GreaseMonkey scripts used that was not available in Chrome. (GreaseMonkey 'API' things)

Can you right click and copy an image? That was not working last time I tried it on OSX.

Yes. http://i.imgur.com/VfAoa.png

No. Have you actually tried it? I just did. It copies a broken image. Sweet.

It works for me on 3 different computers.

I'll probably always have Firefox installed on my machine, but Chrome is my default browser. Chrome is the better piece of software, and one of the best desktop applications overall, it obviously was well thought out and well designed from the start: The sandboxing, the update system, the extension system, the omnibox, using webkit, V8.

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