12 ms·

Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time

174 points by themichael 15y ago

tbassetto 15y ago
Sadly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead. IE10 seems to be quite solid, but it will be available only for Windows 7 and 8 (and not before mid-2012).
- melling 15y ago
  IE8 will be around for years because XP can't get an IE9/10 upgrade. It looks like combined IE6 & IE7 are around 6.5% in North America. IE6 is around 1%. Being able to stop supporting IE6/IE7 is still huge. Yesterday I noticed that this map app no longer supports IE7. http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa "Sorry, you are running an old version of Internet Explorer which is not supported. For more information please visit here " Link: http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html
  - thisisblurry 15y ago
    Google has also dropped support for IE7 as of August this year (for apps at least): http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-modern-browsers.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-m...
AndrewDucker 15y ago
Despite loving Firefox I see this as a good thing. Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user. Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.
- gcp 15y ago
  Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user. I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or care what browser they are using, but they do care what their hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the experts" so they know what's best. Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it gained its market-share in exactly the same manner. And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox. I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.
  - AndrewDucker 15y ago
    Mostly the lack of options, and the way the updates don't get in your way. Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong. So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more. When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome, with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.
  - zhwang 15y ago
    But it's also because Google has been making use of its massive amount of ad space to push Chrome, and on top of that taken out ads in actual physical locations too.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    When the Flash installer bundles Chrome, is the user's default browser reset to Chrome? Assuming Chrome auto-imported all their bookmarks from IE or Firefox, some Chrome users might not even know they are using a different browser. http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/ http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...
w1ntermute 15y ago
Putting aside the layman for the moment, has anyone else found Chrome particularly annoying to use as a power user? There are so many issues, such as the uncustomizable download bar (can't even have it autohide!), the inability to fine-tune history/cache/etc. deletion, inabilility to set filetype-specific download settings, and so on. And Firefox isn't that slow in its latest incarnations.
- JohnTHaller 15y ago
  Of course. Chrome isn't really good for power users due to the less-powerful extension setups (can't even do true ad blocking). And it's of much less interest to companies due to the per-user installation setup and not being self-contained (it relies on the host OS for encryption, proxy handling, etc).
  - justinschuh 15y ago
    Chrome has had a system installer for years: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=118663 http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=11... I'm also not sure what you mean by "not being self-contained." Chrome relies on OS subsystems where appropriate because it simplifies management and provides a consistent user experience--that's why we use the OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings. We've also seen quite a bit of enterprise uptake because Chrome is the only browser that provides full centralized management on all supported platforms (via Windows group policy, Puppet, etc.).
    - andylei 15y ago
      > OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings these things are awesome! firefox just doesn't work with most sites on my company's intranet (particularly with authentication), but when i use chrome, everything just works.
      - zobzu 15y ago
        that sounds odd. details?
JohnTHaller 15y ago
No, it doesn't. Net application's stats, which are much more realistic, are here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri... IE 53% Firefox 22% Chrome 18% Safari 5% Opera 2%
- Gustomaximus 15y ago
  I looked into Net Apps vs Statcounter a couple of years back and found the opposite to be true. From my notes (so may be a little out of date on figures): --------- Stats Counter: Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication. Net Applications: Accumulates data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted websites that collect statistics. The average traffic for a HitsLink customer is just over 1000 page views per day ------ On sample size Net Apps are not nearly as good nor do they have many foreign market users to give a true global picture. It was not until 2010 that Net apps weighted by country population figures which skewed their results heavily to the US market share. And it has been alleged their stats are for sale.
- patrickaljord 15y ago
  Net application's stats are not realistic at all, they are very US-centric. So if you compare them with statcounter stats for the US, you'll notice they are pretty similar http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201011-201111 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201011-201111 IE: 50% Firefox: 20% Chrome: 17% Another good source are wikipedia stats which are pretty global too and closer to statcounter than netmarket, here are the stats for October 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportClients.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/Squ...
xxiao 15y ago
firefox/mozilla was essentially 'funded' by google search(the search bar built-in)? wish it the best, as firebug is my favorite.
- gcp 15y ago
  Firebug is gradually being phased out in favor of built-in developer tools (which is nice, because Firebug is one of the things making Firefox slow). There's been lots of blogging about those lately, just check out a Nightly/Aurora Firefox build.
- zobzu 15y ago
  its mainly funded by the startup homepage in fact which goes to firefox customized google search
amurmann 15y ago
"Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%." "In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%" I am very surprised to see that IE is so much stronger in the US. I always thought IE was strong in Asia and that that lead to its high market share. Does anyone have a theory as to why IE is stronger in the US than in the rest of the world?
VikingCoder 15y ago
It's interesting, if you look at the Worldwide numbers, Chrome seems to be on a steady progression. But if you look at North America or USA, you see that both Firefox and Chrome had a fairly significant dip in the last set of numbers, while IE had a fairly significant uptick.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  Yeah, market share numbers are completely different by country. Compare Germany and South Korea, say.
sanderson1 15y ago
I too am a Chrome convert and loved FireFox in its day (mainly because of its development tools), but its rampant memory leaks drove me away. While Chrome's dev tools aren't quite as robust as FireFox's, they're getting there very very quickly. On a side note, I'm tired of having to design and develop around IE. All versions have the promise of adhering to modern web standards, but with each release, they tend to fall short of those promises.
- tbassetto 15y ago
  May I suggest you to delete your Firefox profile folder (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox) and give it another try? They have corrected tons of problems, really. IE10 is pretty solid, but you're right, we'll have to develop and design for older versions for a long time.
- hack_edu 15y ago
  What's lacking in Chrome's dev tools compared to Firefox? Are we talking native dev tools, or including Firebug and etc in the Firefox camp. Its been my experience that all these valuable extensions get performance hits more and more as Firefox has begun to frown lately, further adding to the decline in quality UX. The fact that Chrome developer tools are built-in and seamlessly integrated is what makes it my primary.
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  Back when I used Windows, the memory leaks in Firefox were one of the main reasons I switched to Chrome on the day it came out and never looked back. I'm not sure if that's still a problem, or if that's a problem on other platforms, but now I use Chromium on Linux and I've never had any major issues. (Except sometimes when Flash is involved, but this is Hacker News).
- Yhippa 15y ago
  Not only that but making sure your work is backwards compatible with older versions of IE is no fun.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
NanoWar 15y ago
When Chrome introduced plug-ins like Adblock, I started to consider switching. Now I'm on Chromium. And it's good.
DanielRibeiro 15y ago
And I remember back then when firefox was not even 1.0, and was replacing the horrible browsing experience on Linux on Konqueror, with a delightful one (with tabs!). I am glad to see how far we've come.
- MikeCapone 15y ago
  I actually liked Konqueror, but it might have been a later version than what you had.
  - guard-of-terra 15y ago
    Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser. E.g. it had okayish system integration while other browsers have it awful. It displayed site favicons in task panel, instead of boasting its own. It was a birthplace of webkit.
    - onedognight 15y ago
      > Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser. More importantly they did something right which is in most other browsers, their renderer!
  - DanielRibeiro 15y ago
    Probably. At the time, the university machines had 256 Ram (it was before Gmail), and konqueror managed to hog a lot of its memory. Firefox would ocupy 30 MB Ram with 5 tabs, so it made things a lot smoother.
joebadmo 15y ago
I work at a federal agency and our browsers just got updated a couple of weeks ago from IE6 to IE8. While I'd kill for either Chrome or FF, I have to say: I never thought I'd be so happy about IE8.
- salmanapk 15y ago
  Install Chrome Frame ;)
soapdog 15y ago
I use firefox because I believe in the work of Mozilla foundation. Chrome, IE, Safari are all company products and those companies objective are tuned to increasing their stock value. Yes, they make very good products but Mozilla makes a good philosophy and I trust them to value privacy, quality and open source. Firefox might be slower than chrome and not that beautiful but it is made with a mindset that is similar to mine. This may sound too political for a software choice decision but hey, I LIKE MOZILLA FOUNDATION and their products.
- roc 15y ago
  Same here. Particularly since Chrome's stripped-down approach has given way to bundled cruft and the competition has pushed Mozilla to improve dramatically. So I'm glad Chrome exists and I hope it continues to do so, but they're not moving in a direction that remotely interests me.
- canes123456 15y ago
  I assume you never buy anything from a company. It pointless to try to prop up products despite it being worse. Open source project will not success in the long run unless it is better. Firefox being better at protecting privacy is a reason to use it, but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason.
  - timwiseman 15y ago
    I assume you never buy anything from a company You can certainly do business with companies, while showing preference for an organization that shares your values whenever such an organization exists. but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason. I think it is more that some people (including me) think Mozilla values privacy because they flat out say they do and then they have a consistent track record of supporting privacy. The fact they are non-profit does make it slightly easier to take their statements at face value, but it is their track record that really demonstrates it.
    - canes123456 15y ago
jaequery 15y ago
there is one big factor why i use chrome over firefox. and that is the auto-complete as i type in things in the address bar. once i got used to that on chrome, i can never get back to firefox, no matter how much they have improved elsewhere. hope this serves as some good feedback to mozilla devs.
- webwanderings 15y ago
  auto-complete is there in Firefox, it is just not there by default.
  - jaequery 15y ago
    good, then question is, will they ever make it by default?
    - webwanderings 15y ago
      I'd rather they make it as a simple enough choice (a check box or something). There are privacy implications of auto-complete and I personally believe Firefox is accurate in not enabling it by default.
- lftl 15y ago
  Funny, the url bar is the biggest reason I want to go back to Firefox. Chrome is frustratingly bad at completing URLs from my history. I can only assume that it's somewhat intentional since Google wants you to search rather than navigate directly, but it's the single biggest pain point in Chrome for me.
webwanderings 15y ago
For my use, I measured my memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome (with whatever little number of tabs I keep open daily), and I found that the memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome is exactly the same. So I don't bother with Google and rely on Mozilla.
miles_matthias 15y ago
Does anyone else find Firefox hideous from an aesthetic perspective? I believe in the work Mozilla does, but I can't use Firefox without being distracted by it. Chrome is gorgeous and gets out of my way, allowing me to focus on what I'm doing. I did see some Firefox beta sketches a while back on HN, and they looked similar to Chrome, so hopefully they go that way.
- jakeonthemove 15y ago
  Are you using XP or Mac OS? Cause Firefox looks pretty nice with Aero on Vista and 7 - a lot like Chrome, actually...
  - miles_matthias 15y ago
    Mac OS X. Interesting.
- wvenable 15y ago
  Chrome and Firefox take up almost exactly the same amount of vertical space on my system. Except for some minor differences, their UI is almost identical.
- zpao 15y ago
  I'm curious what you find "hideous". 3.6 -> 4 was a pretty big overhaul, but I think it looks pretty good. I customize a bit (small buttons, get rid of the search box & home button) and I may be baised. I'll say that Firefox isn't perfect and there are quirks & oddities with bits of the interface. I'm sure there are bugs for most of them though. (note: I work at Mozilla on Firefox, so while I'd normally be curious, I'm invested in fixing problems!)
jakeonthemove 15y ago
Mozilla needs to do more marketing - I seem more ads/posts for Chrome these days, compared to a few years ago when almost every site (that I visited) had a banner saying "Switch to Firefox for a better Web" or smth like that. Both browsers are good, however I use Firefox since I have all the add-ons I need, and the awesome Awesome Bar, which lets me access my favorite sites or sites I visited recently with a few keystrokes or keywords (I remember a word or two in the URL/title and I can always go back). I had no luck finding something like that for Chrome, and that's my biggest annoyance - every time I have to bookmark a site (which I always forget), or I have to search for it again through Google. I type a damn keyword and it searches instead of showing me the URL... I have a suspicion that is on purpose, since it leads me to Google.com :-)...
- starwed 15y ago
  Unsurprisingly, google has a slightly higher marketing budget than mozilla... :P
drivebyacct2 15y ago
All of the talk about giving Firefox a try again... please, someone set up a sane package (PPA?) for Firefox that includes the proper Ubuntu font packages, that will allow me to test the dev releases on my machine. I love Chrome because I get dev builds every other day from their PPA and it just works. I've never had a similar experience when trying to use anything except the distro provided copies of Firefox.
- hsivonen 15y ago
  The Firefox PPA that corresponds to the Chrome dev channel is https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/firefox-aurora https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/firefox...
shmerl 15y ago
I like Firefox for extreme customizability. Nothing matches that and Chrome is nowhere close to it.
linuxhansl 15y ago
Why? Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption. Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is faster and consumes less memory. (And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14) Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.
- hsivonen 15y ago
  Firefox has improved a lot since Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 was released on 2010-01-21. Firefox 8.0 was released on 2011-11-08. (Chrome 14 was released on 2011-09-16.) I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15). (Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)
  - linuxhansl 15y ago
    Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous. What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).
rewiter2011 15y ago
free paid pr spam, i don't believe or trust this site.
- lazugod 15y ago
  Why not? Statcounter would have the right information to make this finding.
jpdelatorre 15y ago
I love Chrome since I don't have to install external flash player plugin which is kinda annoying. Chrome has a built-in flash player. You don't have to update flash and restart all your browser.
senthilnayagam 15y ago
Netscape was pioneer but lost steam later with version wars. Firefox came much later to Mozilla which gave hopes, but performance and memory leaks caused it to never be dominant browser, and it too got into version number war and is loosing. Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on Desktop
mhartl 15y ago
The Awesomebar keeps me using Firefox. Is there an equivalent for Chrome?
ccanassa 15y ago
Chrome has already overtake even IE in South America: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111

174 points by themichael 15y ago

Sadly, Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead. IE10 seems to be quite solid, but it will be available only for Windows 7 and 8 (and not before mid-2012).

melling 15y ago
IE8 will be around for years because XP can't get an IE9/10 upgrade. It looks like combined IE6 & IE7 are around 6.5% in North America. IE6 is around 1%. Being able to stop supporting IE6/IE7 is still huge. Yesterday I noticed that this map app no longer supports IE7. http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa "Sorry, you are running an old version of Internet Explorer which is not supported. For more information please visit here " Link: http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html http://map.itoworld.com/ie-error.html
- thisisblurry 15y ago
  Google has also dropped support for IE7 as of August this year (for apps at least): http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-modern-browsers.html http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-m...

AndrewDucker 15y ago

Despite loving Firefox I see this as a good thing. Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user. Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.

gcp 15y ago
Firefox has always been the hobbyist/technical person's browser. Chrome is a slick experience aimed at the end-user. I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or care what browser they are using, but they do care what their hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the experts" so they know what's best. Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it gained its market-share in exactly the same manner. And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox. I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  Mostly the lack of options, and the way the updates don't get in your way. Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong. So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more. When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome, with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.
- zhwang 15y ago
  But it's also because Google has been making use of its massive amount of ad space to push Chrome, and on top of that taken out ads in actual physical locations too.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  When the Flash installer bundles Chrome, is the user's default browser reset to Chrome? Assuming Chrome auto-imported all their bookmarks from IE or Firefox, some Chrome users might not even know they are using a different browser. http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/ http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...

w1ntermute 15y ago

Putting aside the layman for the moment, has anyone else found Chrome particularly annoying to use as a power user? There are so many issues, such as the uncustomizable download bar (can't even have it autohide!), the inability to fine-tune history/cache/etc. deletion, inabilility to set filetype-specific download settings, and so on. And Firefox isn't that slow in its latest incarnations.

JohnTHaller 15y ago
Of course. Chrome isn't really good for power users due to the less-powerful extension setups (can't even do true ad blocking). And it's of much less interest to companies due to the per-user installation setup and not being self-contained (it relies on the host OS for encryption, proxy handling, etc).
- justinschuh 15y ago
  Chrome has had a system installer for years: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=118663 http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=11... I'm also not sure what you mean by "not being self-contained." Chrome relies on OS subsystems where appropriate because it simplifies management and provides a consistent user experience--that's why we use the OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings. We've also seen quite a bit of enterprise uptake because Chrome is the only browser that provides full centralized management on all supported platforms (via Windows group policy, Puppet, etc.).
  - andylei 15y ago
    > OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings these things are awesome! firefox just doesn't work with most sites on my company's intranet (particularly with authentication), but when i use chrome, everything just works.
    - zobzu 15y ago
      that sounds odd. details?

JohnTHaller 15y ago

No, it doesn't. Net application's stats, which are much more realistic, are here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0 http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri... IE 53% Firefox 22% Chrome 18% Safari 5% Opera 2%

Gustomaximus 15y ago
I looked into Net Apps vs Statcounter a couple of years back and found the opposite to be true. From my notes (so may be a little out of date on figures): --------- Stats Counter: Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication. Net Applications: Accumulates data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted websites that collect statistics. The average traffic for a HitsLink customer is just over 1000 page views per day ------ On sample size Net Apps are not nearly as good nor do they have many foreign market users to give a true global picture. It was not until 2010 that Net apps weighted by country population figures which skewed their results heavily to the US market share. And it has been alleged their stats are for sale.
patrickaljord 15y ago
Net application's stats are not realistic at all, they are very US-centric. So if you compare them with statcounter stats for the US, you'll notice they are pretty similar http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201011-201111 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-US-monthly-201011-201111 IE: 50% Firefox: 20% Chrome: 17% Another good source are wikipedia stats which are pretty global too and closer to statcounter than netmarket, here are the stats for October 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportClients.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/Squ...

xxiao 15y ago

firefox/mozilla was essentially 'funded' by google search(the search bar built-in)? wish it the best, as firebug is my favorite.

gcp 15y ago
Firebug is gradually being phased out in favor of built-in developer tools (which is nice, because Firebug is one of the things making Firefox slow). There's been lots of blogging about those lately, just check out a Nightly/Aurora Firefox build.
zobzu 15y ago
its mainly funded by the startup homepage in fact which goes to firefox customized google search

amurmann 15y ago

"Microsoft's Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%." "In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%" I am very surprised to see that IE is so much stronger in the US. I always thought IE was strong in Asia and that that lead to its high market share. Does anyone have a theory as to why IE is stronger in the US than in the rest of the world?

VikingCoder 15y ago

It's interesting, if you look at the Worldwide numbers, Chrome seems to be on a steady progression. But if you look at North America or USA, you see that both Firefox and Chrome had a fairly significant dip in the last set of numbers, while IE had a fairly significant uptick.

bzbarsky 15y ago
Yeah, market share numbers are completely different by country. Compare Germany and South Korea, say.

sanderson1 15y ago

I too am a Chrome convert and loved FireFox in its day (mainly because of its development tools), but its rampant memory leaks drove me away. While Chrome's dev tools aren't quite as robust as FireFox's, they're getting there very very quickly. On a side note, I'm tired of having to design and develop around IE. All versions have the promise of adhering to modern web standards, but with each release, they tend to fall short of those promises.

tbassetto 15y ago
May I suggest you to delete your Firefox profile folder (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox) and give it another try? They have corrected tons of problems, really. IE10 is pretty solid, but you're right, we'll have to develop and design for older versions for a long time.
hack_edu 15y ago
What's lacking in Chrome's dev tools compared to Firefox? Are we talking native dev tools, or including Firebug and etc in the Firefox camp. Its been my experience that all these valuable extensions get performance hits more and more as Firefox has begun to frown lately, further adding to the decline in quality UX. The fact that Chrome developer tools are built-in and seamlessly integrated is what makes it my primary.
chimeracoder 15y ago
Back when I used Windows, the memory leaks in Firefox were one of the main reasons I switched to Chrome on the day it came out and never looked back. I'm not sure if that's still a problem, or if that's a problem on other platforms, but now I use Chromium on Linux and I've never had any major issues. (Except sometimes when Flash is involved, but this is Hacker News).
Yhippa 15y ago
Not only that but making sure your work is backwards compatible with older versions of IE is no fun.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

NanoWar 15y ago

When Chrome introduced plug-ins like Adblock, I started to consider switching. Now I'm on Chromium. And it's good.

DanielRibeiro 15y ago

And I remember back then when firefox was not even 1.0, and was replacing the horrible browsing experience on Linux on Konqueror, with a delightful one (with tabs!). I am glad to see how far we've come.

MikeCapone 15y ago
I actually liked Konqueror, but it might have been a later version than what you had.
- guard-of-terra 15y ago
  Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser. E.g. it had okayish system integration while other browsers have it awful. It displayed site favicons in task panel, instead of boasting its own. It was a birthplace of webkit.
  - onedognight 15y ago
    > Konqueror did a lot of things right which still aren't by any other browser. More importantly they did something right which is in most other browsers, their renderer!
- DanielRibeiro 15y ago
  Probably. At the time, the university machines had 256 Ram (it was before Gmail), and konqueror managed to hog a lot of its memory. Firefox would ocupy 30 MB Ram with 5 tabs, so it made things a lot smoother.

joebadmo 15y ago

I work at a federal agency and our browsers just got updated a couple of weeks ago from IE6 to IE8. While I'd kill for either Chrome or FF, I have to say: I never thought I'd be so happy about IE8.

salmanapk 15y ago
Install Chrome Frame ;)

soapdog 15y ago

I use firefox because I believe in the work of Mozilla foundation. Chrome, IE, Safari are all company products and those companies objective are tuned to increasing their stock value. Yes, they make very good products but Mozilla makes a good philosophy and I trust them to value privacy, quality and open source. Firefox might be slower than chrome and not that beautiful but it is made with a mindset that is similar to mine. This may sound too political for a software choice decision but hey, I LIKE MOZILLA FOUNDATION and their products.

roc 15y ago
Same here. Particularly since Chrome's stripped-down approach has given way to bundled cruft and the competition has pushed Mozilla to improve dramatically. So I'm glad Chrome exists and I hope it continues to do so, but they're not moving in a direction that remotely interests me.
canes123456 15y ago
I assume you never buy anything from a company. It pointless to try to prop up products despite it being worse. Open source project will not success in the long run unless it is better. Firefox being better at protecting privacy is a reason to use it, but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason.
- timwiseman 15y ago
  I assume you never buy anything from a company You can certainly do business with companies, while showing preference for an organization that shares your values whenever such an organization exists. but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason. I think it is more that some people (including me) think Mozilla values privacy because they flat out say they do and then they have a consistent track record of supporting privacy. The fact they are non-profit does make it slightly easier to take their statements at face value, but it is their track record that really demonstrates it.
  - canes123456 15y ago

jaequery 15y ago

there is one big factor why i use chrome over firefox. and that is the auto-complete as i type in things in the address bar. once i got used to that on chrome, i can never get back to firefox, no matter how much they have improved elsewhere. hope this serves as some good feedback to mozilla devs.

webwanderings 15y ago
auto-complete is there in Firefox, it is just not there by default.
- jaequery 15y ago
  good, then question is, will they ever make it by default?
  - webwanderings 15y ago
    I'd rather they make it as a simple enough choice (a check box or something). There are privacy implications of auto-complete and I personally believe Firefox is accurate in not enabling it by default.
lftl 15y ago
Funny, the url bar is the biggest reason I want to go back to Firefox. Chrome is frustratingly bad at completing URLs from my history. I can only assume that it's somewhat intentional since Google wants you to search rather than navigate directly, but it's the single biggest pain point in Chrome for me.

webwanderings 15y ago

For my use, I measured my memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome (with whatever little number of tabs I keep open daily), and I found that the memory usage on both Firefox and Chrome is exactly the same. So I don't bother with Google and rely on Mozilla.

miles_matthias 15y ago

Does anyone else find Firefox hideous from an aesthetic perspective? I believe in the work Mozilla does, but I can't use Firefox without being distracted by it. Chrome is gorgeous and gets out of my way, allowing me to focus on what I'm doing. I did see some Firefox beta sketches a while back on HN, and they looked similar to Chrome, so hopefully they go that way.

jakeonthemove 15y ago
Are you using XP or Mac OS? Cause Firefox looks pretty nice with Aero on Vista and 7 - a lot like Chrome, actually...
- miles_matthias 15y ago
  Mac OS X. Interesting.
wvenable 15y ago
Chrome and Firefox take up almost exactly the same amount of vertical space on my system. Except for some minor differences, their UI is almost identical.
zpao 15y ago
I'm curious what you find "hideous". 3.6 -> 4 was a pretty big overhaul, but I think it looks pretty good. I customize a bit (small buttons, get rid of the search box & home button) and I may be baised. I'll say that Firefox isn't perfect and there are quirks & oddities with bits of the interface. I'm sure there are bugs for most of them though. (note: I work at Mozilla on Firefox, so while I'd normally be curious, I'm invested in fixing problems!)

jakeonthemove 15y ago

Mozilla needs to do more marketing - I seem more ads/posts for Chrome these days, compared to a few years ago when almost every site (that I visited) had a banner saying "Switch to Firefox for a better Web" or smth like that. Both browsers are good, however I use Firefox since I have all the add-ons I need, and the awesome Awesome Bar, which lets me access my favorite sites or sites I visited recently with a few keystrokes or keywords (I remember a word or two in the URL/title and I can always go back). I had no luck finding something like that for Chrome, and that's my biggest annoyance - every time I have to bookmark a site (which I always forget), or I have to search for it again through Google. I type a damn keyword and it searches instead of showing me the URL... I have a suspicion that is on purpose, since it leads me to Google.com :-)...

starwed 15y ago
Unsurprisingly, google has a slightly higher marketing budget than mozilla... :P

drivebyacct2 15y ago

All of the talk about giving Firefox a try again... please, someone set up a sane package (PPA?) for Firefox that includes the proper Ubuntu font packages, that will allow me to test the dev releases on my machine. I love Chrome because I get dev builds every other day from their PPA and it just works. I've never had a similar experience when trying to use anything except the distro provided copies of Firefox.

hsivonen 15y ago
The Firefox PPA that corresponds to the Chrome dev channel is https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/firefox-aurora https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla-daily/+archive/firefox...

shmerl 15y ago

I like Firefox for extreme customizability. Nothing matches that and Chrome is nowhere close to it.

linuxhansl 15y ago

Why? Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption. Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is faster and consumes less memory. (And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14) Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.

hsivonen 15y ago
Firefox has improved a lot since Firefox 3.6. Firefox 3.6 was released on 2010-01-21. Firefox 8.0 was released on 2011-11-08. (Chrome 14 was released on 2011-09-16.) I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15). (Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)
- linuxhansl 15y ago
  Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous. What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).

rewiter2011 15y ago

free paid pr spam, i don't believe or trust this site.

lazugod 15y ago
Why not? Statcounter would have the right information to make this finding.

jpdelatorre 15y ago

I love Chrome since I don't have to install external flash player plugin which is kinda annoying. Chrome has a built-in flash player. You don't have to update flash and restart all your browser.

senthilnayagam 15y ago

Netscape was pioneer but lost steam later with version wars. Firefox came much later to Mozilla which gave hopes, but performance and memory leaks caused it to never be dominant browser, and it too got into version number war and is loosing. Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on Desktop

mhartl 15y ago

The Awesomebar keeps me using Firefox. Is there an equivalent for Chrome?

ccanassa 15y ago

Chrome has already overtake even IE in South America: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-sa-monthly-201011-201111