Firefox, I Just Can't Quit You

People used to ridiculing someone for not using IE6.

If you don't use the "norm" you are an outsider :) and frankly Chrome is the "norm" atm.

Yeah. Good grief. What kind of person ridicules a co-worker repeatedly for their browser choice? Even IE, maybe joke about it once and then move to something important like text editors.

I may have overstated this. It's not like they're giving me that much grief. We just all joke about it.

They're not ridiculing him. It's natural and desirable for developers to be curious about other developers' setup.

I agree Chrome has never made lots of tabs easy. Since I'm usually signing into multiple accounts, I have several windows open anyway, so don't feel the pain as much as I used to.

I find this point and the XHR annoyance not enough to sway me though. Devtools keeps getting insanely more powerful to the point where front-ends will probably be using it as a proper IDE in a couple of years.

I think ridicule may have been a little bit of hyperbole. If he genuinely felt ridiculed and uncomfortable I doubt he would be writing about it on his blog.

I think it would be bizarre to work in an environment where people did not joke about each other's "questionable" technology choices. The vim guy catches flak in the emacs shop. The debian guy (me) catches flak from his OSX friends asking if I recompiled my kernel for the 10th time in order to get my "flaky" free video driver to work. When I do habitat for humanity work I hear guys teasing someone for still using a miter box or for using the kickback guard on a table saw. I think a certain amount of teasing is healthy and natural among friendly coworkers.

Sidenote: I've been a FF user since it was firebird and I don't expect that to change.

>possibly with better privacy

Can you elaborate?

I would have described my work the same way, even if that's taking a bit of poetic license. I started developing in Aurora about six months ago to try out some of the new dev tools. The question of why is a surprisingly regular conversation with anyone who notices, starting anywhere from "Why don't you use Chrome" to "What the hell are you using this for?"

It's a bit ironic: I moved away from Firefox about four years ago because of its memory usage, and now I'm considering switching back from Chrome for pretty much the same reason.

For 1 there are many extensions like InstantFox or Omnibar

Here are some power user tips for the awesomebar: ^ xxx - search xxx in your browsing history. * xxx - search xxx in your bookmarks. + xxx - search xxx in pages you've tagged. % xxx - search xxx in your currently open tabs. ~ xxx - search xxx in pages you've typed. # xxx - search xxx in page titles. @ xxx - search xxx in web addresses (URLs).

I can't think what more you would need ;o)

Actually, Chrome has multi-session support built in. Try clicking on the head icon in the top right corner (on OS X) and click "New User". You'll get a new context with it's own cookies, cache, window etc. that you can switch to anytime.

Same here, I need Tab Mix Plus for the switching of last tab behavior. The one when press CTRL+Tab it switches back to the previous tab and not the next tab.

Absolutely nothing's wrong with FF, but there are sometimes reasons to use chrome. Different browsers, different bugs, after all... :]

I normally use FF, but there are situations where I use chrome instead (both very up-to-date versions, so more or less as good as they get).

chrome uses more memory on average because of the multi-process architecture, but that architecture also makes user-control of memory usage much more convenient, because closing a tab with a memory-hog page in it immediately releases a hefty chunk of memory (whereas this usually isn't the case with FF). So sometimes when my memory is running low, I'll use chrome, despite the higher average memory usage, to get the increased controllability.

There are also cases of bleeding edge html5 stuff where the chrome implementation works better. E.g., both seem to support webgl in general, but some webgl-using pages only work properly in chrome for me.

It's really nice to have available two completely independent implementations of a modern, featureful, robust web-browser... Before chrome, there was [on linux] basically FF and a bunch of toy browsers, and the latter were often not very usable for many pages.

How do you enable the three finger swipe to change tabs on Chrome?

I researched it briefly, at that time it was not possible.

There are lots of attempts to be "good enough" at tab management to make surviving without tree tabs possible. Some of them come close, most don't. At the end of the day, I changed my workflow to work with Chrome, rather than vice-versa because I found Chrome's responsiveness more valuable than Firefox's plugins.

Yes, firefox tabs are definitely way better. I am a tab addict too - right now I have open 20 of them, and that's only because it's night and I'm not working and done most of my daily reading and closed the extra ones. Usually it'd easily be 30+ of them. Firefox allows to manage them much better. I still use Chrome though because FF memory management is still - even with recent improvements gets out of hand pretty quickly (matter of days with my - admittedly heavy - usage). But their tab system is one thing which always tempts me to switch. It is way ahead of what Chrome can do.

I need my trees. But yes, side over top is such a vast improvement.

Hell, I remember when tabbed browsing was all new and stuff. Thanks, Opera (though I never actually used you).

> One of my favorite Firefox extensions is RESTClient (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restclient/?s...). Haven't found a tool as nice in Chrome yet.

Here you go: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-clien...

Postman has some amazing features like Environments and Collections so you can save some common headers/requests.

The problem (at least when I last looked) was that Chrome's extension framework just plain makes it impossible to create an extension that supports side tabs properly.

I find Firefox uses less RAM on my machine and the extensions work far better, I don't any advantage to using Chrome.

> Chrome developer tools don't even come close.

Now that is just silly.

I found it pretty easy to switch from Firebug to chrome devtools. They were behind for some time but now I hardly can imagine a case where Chrome devtools did not work for me the same way as Firebug.