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Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

Like so many people I know, I've ditched Firefox in the past few months for Chrome. I loved Mozilla Firefox when it came out but the fast couple of versions they seem to have lost the plot.

I looked in "A competetive landscape" for some insight on how they would seek to be the best browser again.

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/a-compet...

But, all I see is horn-tooting. Where's the Mozilla I fell in love with?

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I have been extremely impressed with the Firefox 4 betas. They have definitely restored my faith as it were. Previously, I had almost fully converted to Chrome myself.

One important point that's not really mentioned in this document is that the increased competition is good for Mozilla's goals. Not only does it force us to work harder and better to grow Firefox's user base; it's also good for our deeper goals as a non-profit dedicated to innovation and openness on the internet.

Mozilla never wanted to just kick IE6's ass for years. A market with several high-quality browsers is a big part of what this community has been working toward.

I think that what is so great about chrome is the lack of useless feature and focus on the core ones (speed to name only this one). Mozilla, by contrast, seems to say Yes to everything and by any means become really slow. On my mac, I need to test on both browser and the speed difference between those browsers is phenomenal. Seriously, if firebug was on chrome, I wouldn't need firefox anymore. (I'm a bit sad about that)

> Seriously, if firebug was on chrome, I wouldn't need firefox anymore.

I'm working with the Chrome Dev Tools team to make them even better. Would love to hear more from you on what needs to happen. :)

Firebug has the option to show XHRs inline with the console. Also, in chrome console.dir prints the object collapsed. I find it annoying to have to expand the object in the console when clearly I want to see the object's properties.

Good call on auto-opening those objects-- I'll file that with the team. You can right-click in the console to turn on XHR logging.

What features does Firefox have that Chrome doesn't?

They might not be built-in, but the two things that sent me back to Firefox after using Chrome for ten minutes were:

- Chrome has no "Allow web pages to choose their own fonts" checkbox that I can uncheck. The web is a hideous typographic cacophony without this option.

- Chrome doesn't have the TreeStyleTabs extension. Chrome's default tab-handling is better than Firefox's default tab-handling, but TreeStyleTabs is just better.

Since I last tried using Chrome, Firefox 4 nightlies gained the new Tab Panorama feature, which is possibly even better than TreeStyleTabs unless you have a lot of tabs in your working set.

I read that page and can't imagine what else they could possibly say. What were you hoping for?

I, too, would like to see Mozilla become more agile and cutting-edge. I still hold respect for them, though, as the organization that taught the masses "IE != The Internet".

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