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Comment by jeresig | Hacker News Reader

Off the top of my head, three things that've bugged me:

I use a ton of tabs in my browser, in Firefox the tabs go off to the side and allow me to scroll through them (while still allowing me to read the title) whereas Chrome squishes the tabs into tiny micro-sized pills that are completely unreadable.

Additionally I use App Tabs in both browsers - but only in Firefox does it highlight when I've received an update (such as a message in Hip Chat or an email in Gmail).

The lack of integrated extensions in Chrome makes for a weaker overall experience. I use PasswordMaker to manage my passwords - works great in Firefox, can enter passwords into any field, but in Chrome it frequently doesn't detect a password field - and since it doesn't have context menu access I can't fill in my password. I end up having to open up Firefox just to get to my password.

So yeah, I still use Firefox for daily browsing, and Chrome for dev.

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Chrome does have a notification that a tab has updated, it's a gentle little pulsing light across the tab (granted, maybe there should be an option to make this a colored pulsing light or something)

I have yet to see it work - at least my Hip Chat tab doesn't update when a new chat comes in, whereas it does in Firefox.

Hmm... wait, y'know, I just realized that I usually notice it on my Windows machine (though maybe that's because of the semi-transparent chrome)... maybe it doesn't work on OS X though.

What's wrong with using Firefox if it works better for you exactly?

Have you tried using tree tabs in Chrome? It isn't quite as slick as the Firefox tree tabs, but still nicer than the little nubs that are the default. That's interesting though, I always do dev stuff in Firefox because of how anemic firebug is in Chrome, and casual surfing in Chrome because it feels faster.

I find the developer tools in chrome actually better than firebug these days. Do you have any specific features that you miss with the current builds of both?

I suppose it's mostly layout/look&feel. I actually didn't realize how powerful the built in Chrome developer tools were. Little things, like showing the color or image when you mouse over the hex or link are what make Firebug nicer to use, I think. Is there a way to persist the network tab or console across page loads in Chrome?

yep, they have a persistence button like firebug these days. on the network panel it's the black circle, and the console seems to have it in a settings panel (although I'm on a dev build, I think it's also a button on release build.

agreed about the little things like hovers. I still find that double clicks on image resources in css not opening them in a new tab drives me mad :)

I do love chromes timings panel, with rendering timings. much better for optimizing. and their whole dev tools seem to run a lot quicker for me, firebug I have speed issues with sometimes, especially on complicated js pages.

Have you tried YSlow for Firebug?

I find they are all lacking in major ways and I have to jump between IE, FireFox, and Chrome. Anyone that swears by a single browser's dev tools isn't making much use of them.

  - Only Chrome lets you set a breakpoint on JS event listeners.
  - Only IE let's you change the next line of execution in JS.
  - You *can't* edit the value of a local variable in the Chrome console!
  - Only IE9 & FF search multiple JS files when doing a text find.
  - IE doesn't refresh the dev tools representation of the DOM without clicking refresh.
  - Only IE has a "format JavaScript" for minimized, obfuscated JS.  And it allows you to set breakpoints on the formatted lines!
  - Only Chrome has tools for finding memory leaks (see dev channel for big improvements in that).

Etc, etc.

Minor quibble. The latest versions of chrome(12 onwards) let you de-obfuscate JS code, and set breakpoints in the cleaned up code. Just right click in the source tab pane, and the code get prettified.

Only IE (so far) has lied horribly to me in its debugger: http://cl.ly/012t192A2s3Y1A3b3j3H . How in the world does that happen? For the record, `FireEvent` doesn't exist, but `fireEvent` does.

And then there's the worthless "{...}" object display from the Javascript console...

The horrible "{...}" output for almost everything (and proper callstacks when using named function expressions) are all fixed in IE9. That still puts it dead last for MOST visualizations behind all the other browsers OTHER than IE8, but some things, such as the profiler call tree, are still the best.

which extension do you use for tree tabs in chrome?

> The lack of integrated extensions in Chrome <

Could you elaborate on this -- do you mean that the permissions available to Chrome extensions are limited?

Yes. Although I was just reading through the extension docs and realized that you do have permission to add context menu items: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/contextMenus.html

So yeah, strike the last item from my list - I blame it solely on PasswordMaker.

Well if you use a ton of tabs in Chrome, you can try Vertical Tabs. You would have to add the following to your Chrome shortcut:

   -enable-apps -enable-vertical-tabs

Open Chrome, Right Click on a Tab and check on Use Side Tabs.

It eats up a little of your screen real estate but I guess that should be okay as you have a 27" iMac. And you will be able to see the names of every tabs then !!!

Just navigate to chrome://flags/ and you can enable it there along with many other experimental options.

you should really try the "tree style tab" extension for firefox. it's pure bliss for tab addicts.

The "tiny micro-sized pills" in Chrome are a headache. I've never tried the App Tabs extension though, thanks for mentioning it.

I strongly recommend the "Tree Style Tab" extension for Firefox. It give you a vertical tab bar and makes 20-50 tabs per window pretty manageable.

Chrome has a "Use side tabs" option in Labs, though only on Windows and Linux for some reason.

It's sort of like TreeStyleTabs, but nowhere near as powerful. With TST, you can configure the placement and look of the tab bar (or autohide it), group tabs into trees that you can collapse/expand/reload/close separate trees, and a number of other nit-picking options and actions that just make it feel right. Side tabs feels like an afterthought in comparison.

I mention this not to hate on Chrome or side tabs, but because I hope one day it will be as good. Once Chrome gets an actual equivalent version of TST and Pentadactyl, I'll happily switch.

I feel like a broken record on this issue, but every few weeks I'll get fed up with something about FF and look to see if Chrome finally has a decent port of this and I'm always disappointed. One day, I hope...

I prefer them to scrolling when there are a lot of tabs open. Although Firefox's expose-style tab candy feature is nice enough that I don't get as many tabs stacking up as I might otherwise.

You should try the vertical tabs option in Chrome's about:flags page. Tabs move to the left side of the window and don't become squished when you have many of them. You can just scroll up and down the stack.

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