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Comment by 3dFlatLander | Hacker News Reader

For as popular as chrome is, I feel like the browser market is going to become bifurcated between "normal users" and developers. Chrome is speedy, stable, and I recommend it to everyone since I'm the computer guy in my circle. But Firefox is still my development browser, and I don't see that changing any time soon.

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I felt the same way as you. But a few weeks ago I moved to trialing Chrome as both my development and everyday browser. After close to 4 weeks now of trialing Chrome, I'm 99% certain that I won't be going back to FF for development and certainly not for everyday web browsing. I've now installed a total of 10 extensions into Chrome that well enough duplicate everything I had in FF (supporting my web dev and typical browsing activities). And bear in mind this is from a guy who has used FF for many years and was really looking for any excuse not to make the switch. But I gave it a chance and am actually quite surprised that Chrome has won me over.

The clincher for me was looking at Chrome extension development. The extension system for Chrome seems really accessible and well thought out and I feel like I could make some Chrome extensions for myself without really any hassle at all. In contrast, I have been told by acquaintances who have made FF add-ons that FF add-on development can be quite an unpleasant experience.

As a long-time FF user (and Firebird before that, and Pheonix before that) it would take a bit to sway me. Having said that, you're right that add-on development is unnecessarily tedious (seriously, it should start as easy as that cool link I saw on here that allows you to setup jQuery scripts ala easy-Greasemonkey) , I have to say that FF is surprisingly slow these days, and why does it update on launch (surely it could do a pre-update behind the scenes, and do a switch over of .exe on launch or something).

My experience so far has shown that if you're looking for an exact one-to-one duplication of the FF experience, then yeah, Chrome's not there yet and possibly never will be.

Coming from FF I had this funny moment when I opened up the Chrome preferences menu and it opened in a tab, just like a web page (I assume because it is just a web page) and I thought "huh, that feels a little strange..." then I opened up some extension's options page and it was just a web page too and I thought "Actually, preferences and options as just plain web pages is really cool and intuitive after getting over the subtle shock of them not being in those little pop-up dialogs." It unifies things nicely and this approach is one of the reasons why extension development in Chrome can be made so intuitive for people already experienced with web technologies.

Regarding the slow performance of FF lately: I remember some months ago I had this situation where I was trying to debug a JS powered upload progress bar I was working on which relied on AJAX calls to update the length of the bar and it just wasn't updating or it would update once, then nothing until the very end when it would shoot to 100%. Watching in Firebug, AJAX calls were being made but seemingly nothing was coming back. I was stumped, I tried everything I could think of, until by chance I tried turning Firebug off and bam! My upload progress bar started working perfectly. JS in Firefox with Firebug on top of it was slow enough that the multiple AJAX calls needed by the upload progress bar weren't working properly anymore. Looking back, I think that day the seed was planted for my move to Chrome.

Use the Add-on SDK, formerly known as the Jetpack SDK. It's much easier to use than the old extension system.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/builder

What makes Firefox superior as a development browser? The Chrome Developer tools are, IMO far better then firebug...

I don't think they're necessarily superior, but I use chrome for everything anyway because it's my main browser. I don't do too much front end stuff, but for JS debugging and the odd css/html hack, it's more than enough to keep me from having to have two browsers open.

Firebug with

Firecookie http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firecookie/

Firequery http://firequery.binaryage.com/

Firepicker http://thedarkone.github.com/firepicker/

Jsonview http://jsonview.com/

Colorzilla http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

> Firecookie http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firecookie/

Built into the Webkit Developer Tools

> Firequery http://firequery.binaryage.com/

jQuery objects visualisation (in console and inspector) are in the Developer Tools, rest is not (though the injection is a bookmarklet/browser extension away)

> Firepicker http://thedarkone.github.com/firepicker/

Missing indeed, Opera's Dragonfly has a color picker but the webkit devtools don't.

> Jsonview http://jsonview.com/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihc...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ddngkjbldiejbheifc...

https://github.com/rfletcher/safari-json-formatter

> Colorzilla http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hmdcmlfkchdmnmnmhe... ?

Well for cookies chrome only shows the value, gives less control than firecookie. Other extensions seems 'hacky' solutions, doesn't feel integrated, some time slow. Also for css editing like add style, increasing/decreasing css rule value firebug is still better than chrome inspector (chrome still does not support increasing/decreasing in metrics tab). But javascript debugging experience is better in chrome. Chrome has good profiler, can add XHR breakpoint, listen for various event listener.

On an unrelated note I can't live without tree style tabs(On average I have 30+ open tabs, which is unmanageable in chrome, hangs some time) and vimperator. All in all I still prefer firefox.

I don't use Chrome at all, and don't even have it installed on most of my OS installs. I have Firefox everywhere though, and I'm pretty happy with IE and Safari respectively as backup browsers.

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