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Comment by pacomerh | Hacker News Reader

Chrome is faster, has great extensions, why would I use Firefox?.

I find the current Firefox to be equal to Chrome in terms of speed, it uses less memory than Chrome, it has much better extensions (including adblock, noscript and vimperator, which are all nicer than their Chrome equivalents), the UI itself is also more configurable (e.g. toolbars, add-on bar; also, we can't even have a bookmarks sidebar in Chrome! In general, if I don't like some aspect of Firefox I can change it, whereas this is not always the case with Chrome), and I like to keep my data to myself as far as possible.

For me, the best thing about Chrome is that it's arrival on the browser scene motivated Mozilla to redouble their efforts, especially in terms of performance and stability, and this has borne fruits with recent iterations of Firefox.

> Chrome is faster, has great extensions, why would I use Firefox?.

Firefox is more open, has new JS language features before anyone else, why would I use Chrome? :P

the awesome bar is still better than the omnibar IMHO, but that's the only thing I can think of. Some extensions may still be better in firefox land too.

But, I too left firefox behind, mostly because of lack of OSX keychain integration, and I have very little hope that mozilla is going to fix an issue 11 years old anytime soon[0]

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400

Pentadactyl, Firebug are mostly the reasons I use Firefox. Also I like my privacy.

Chrome dev tools are equal as powerful, and regarding the other comment about speed. I have tried the new firefox and chrome still flows better. The reasons posted here are not sufficient, sounds like the firefox users are just loyal.

I recently started using Firefox Aurora after years with Chrome, so I'm not a loyal FF user :) What made me switch is vimperator, I really like being able to navigate with the keyboard when my MBP is docked and issuing commands by their name(e.g., I can add a page to pinboard with `:pin`), also it saves some screen space by removing the navigation toolbar. Another nice feature is macro-recording, if you are doing a very repetitive task you can record a macro and run it when needed.

Obviously FF is far from the perfect browser, I hate that it doesn't use native ui elements on web pages(e.g., the `select` html element) and I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome.

As an Emacs fan, I really enjoy the Firemacs extension.

"I think it's a bit more resource-hungry than Chrome"

Depends on what you measure and your usage patterns. Firefox runs circles around Chrome with regards to memory usage and features like "load tabs on demand" can further lower the general resource usage drastically.

The lack of native UI styling of 'select' elements is a disgrace though, especially on Mac. Firefox is the last browser to exhibit this and there are no sign that this will changed in the near future. :-(

No, it has nothing to do with loyalty but with utility and how you weigh the different feature sets of each browser (speed et al. being features as well for the sake of this discussion). I find such claims disingenuous because they assume that Chrome can act as a drop-in replacement for Firefox which can be trivially shown not to be true. You seem to compare the browsers from the point of shared features or features exclusive to Chrome which understandably can lead to wrong conclusions about Firefox users.

Chrome's features don't constitute a superset of Firefox features and vice versa. Examples for features exclusive to Firefox:

1) Tab groups 2) Awesomebar (which works very differently than the Omnibar) 3) History sync 4) Load tabs on demand 5) Bookmark tags 6) Livemarks 7) Better resource usage (especially memory)

And I could easily add several more, both native as well as the ones added by extensions. You may not care about some or all of these features because they don't fit into your browser usage pattern, but others do. Speed is also important to me and I'm glad that Firefox gets improved with each new version currently but it's not the deciding criteria as long as it doesn't inhibit me from using the browser as I wish.

IMO Chrome is great, but Firefox has more features that I like. The minor speed differences are inconsequential and FireFox is faster at some things anyway.

Depending on the site page loading can still badly affect interface responsiveness. There are a number of projects to alleviate this under the umbrella of the Snappy project[1] but for all the work the Mozilla devs have have put into it, Firefox as of now (Fx13) is still nowhere near as smooth as its biggest competitor for regular use cases. I'm hoping that the SuperSnappy research project[2] will produce usable results though.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121

> Chrome is faster

Slower for me. Hits the disk more.

> has great extensions

Not nearly enough. Not by half.

Also, there's the issue of respect: Chrome doesn't respect me nearly enough to let me configure my browser to how I want it. I did away with the speed dial 'feature' in Firefox; I can't do that in Chrome. Not possible. That's just one example of many.

Firefox respects me. Therefore, I use it.

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