5 ms·

Firefox still has a great chance. They've sped up their dev cycle to try to keep pace with Chrome. As soon as they finally end the ridiculous memory usage pro

by acabal 15y ago

Firefox still has a great chance. They've sped up their dev cycle to try to keep pace with Chrome. As soon as they finally end the ridiculous memory usage problems that persist to this day and enable silent auto-updates (auto-updates are coming soon, I think), they'll be back in the game. I only recommend Chrome because it auto-updates. If one of my users starts using Chrome, I always know they'll have the latest and greatest. That's not yet the case with FF, but I'll recommend FF again as soon as the auto-updates land.

redthrowaway 15y ago
I like firefox. I really do. I've donated to Mozilla, and wear my resulting FF t-shirt with pride. That said, it's not just auto-update that makes Chrome more attractive. The omnibox, polarizing though it may be, sets Chrome apart from every other browser as far as U[I|X] goes. Oddly enough, that one feature alone is enough to make it my default browser. Were FF as fast as Chrome, I'd still use the latter because I just like using it more. Chrome's sandboxing, V8, and other intelligent features are just icing on the cake. This, ultimately, confuses me more than anything about the other browser vendors' reaction to Chrome. They've copied or are copying just about everything about it: short release cycles, better JS engines, sandboxing... but not the one definitive UI feature that has made it so attractive to so many people. This surprises me. I would have though Apple, at least, with its commitment to minimalistic UIs, would have been quick to hop on that train, but no dice.
- rue 15y ago
  I'm not entirely familiar with what omnibox does, but there're a few search bar addons, and quickly testing on 11, typing "whuh" in the navigation bar goes to a Google search too. Personally, I just use vimperator (the clones of which on Chrome are…abysmal?) so I can o[pen]/t[abopen] and then type a search term (w/ customizable engine) or a URL. … Memorywise, the recent FFs are much better. Usually problems are caused by extensions.
- robtoo 15y ago
  I've had a look at Google's docs[1], and it's really not clear to me what Chrome's omnibox offers that Firefox's address bar (or whatever they call it) doesn't. http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95440 http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
  - redthrowaway 15y ago
    I've got Aurora installed for Tor and flash-based apps that don't play nicely with Chrome, but I still use Chrome for my daily surfing and so have not really noticed any of the changes Mozilla has made. If the address bar really is reproducing the functionality of the omnibox, why not kill the search box all together? It seems like duplicated functionality and a waste of screen real estate.
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      Some of us actually like distinguishing between URLs/bookmarks/history and an autocomplete-with-search-engine-spying search facility. I don't view the trend of combining them into a single text box as a positive one, whichever browser is doing it.
    - robtoo 15y ago
      I think the only use for the search box now is to give people easy access to multiple (or a secondary) search engine. Sure, it's ugly, but it does give users a clear and simple way to search wikipedia for "widgets". Chrome, on the other hand, only exposes non-Google search engines through the search engine keyword thingy, which means a user has to actually type "en.wikipedia.org widgets" into the omnibox. Sure, tab-completion will do half the work, but the user still has to remember to start typing "en." rather than, say, "wikipedia". I know that Chrome (and, indeed, Firefox) allow you to edit those search engine keywords, but that is power-user territory, and power-users can edit their Firefox UI as well. http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png
      - Lazare 15y ago
        Minor quibble, but Chrome makes it pretty easy to change your default search engine to anything you want, including non-Google search engines. It's not that you need to use a keyword to search a non-Google search engine, it's that you need to use a keyword to search a non-default search engine. :)
- captaincrowbar 15y ago
  Apple are switching to a Chrome-style unified address/search bar in Safari 5.2 (now in beta).
- thwest 15y ago
  I have have better luck with awesomebar personally. My searches tend to hit words in URLs and titles of history before I actually want to duckduckgo. Omnibox also breaks my usage pattern for intranet (no tld) URLs.
- kenmazy 15y ago
  I also like chrome's omnibox, but I dislike their support for rss feeds as a bookmark (live rss) as well as their video adblock (doesn't work). For firefox, I use the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ addon, it works quite well for me. Now if only I could find a way to get firefox tabs into the title bar...
Silhouette 15y ago
Messing around with updates every few weeks is the single biggest thing pushing me away from Firefox as my default browser. (I do a lot of web development, so I routinely have four or five different ones installed. It's just a question of where I keep my serious bookmarks etc.) As a web developer, I'm fed up of the moving targets and unreliability. When Firefox pushes an update to everyone and breaks something fundamental, it's not the Firefox support desk that gets complained at when the web apps stop working. As a user, I see little real advantage from the breakneck pace of development anyway. Inevitably only a few sites use bleeding edge features within weeks of their appearance, and most of them seem to be web design/web development blogs showing off about bleeding edge features that might one day be useful to real web sites. Moving to silent updates, as done by Chrome, might reduce the hassle, but then we'll also see endless minor UI tweaks happening at apparently random times like Chrome, which is really annoying in itself. And of course if a major bug gets pushed out and breaks a site I care about as a visitor, it's just as annoying whether I manually updated (not that there's much choice if security patches stop for anything more than five minutes old) or it happened silently in the background. I never recommend Chrome or Firefox with the auto-updates. In fact, we explicitly don't provide customer support for them any more on several projects I work with, that conclusion being reached independently by several different development teams after experiencing all-too-similar problems. If anyone asks, I think the official recommendation in most cases is currently IE9.

by acabal 15y ago

redthrowaway 15y ago

I like firefox. I really do. I've donated to Mozilla, and wear my resulting FF t-shirt with pride. That said, it's not just auto-update that makes Chrome more attractive. The omnibox, polarizing though it may be, sets Chrome apart from every other browser as far as U[I|X] goes. Oddly enough, that one feature alone is enough to make it my default browser. Were FF as fast as Chrome, I'd still use the latter because I just like using it more. Chrome's sandboxing, V8, and other intelligent features are just icing on the cake. This, ultimately, confuses me more than anything about the other browser vendors' reaction to Chrome. They've copied or are copying just about everything about it: short release cycles, better JS engines, sandboxing... but not the one definitive UI feature that has made it so attractive to so many people. This surprises me. I would have though Apple, at least, with its commitment to minimalistic UIs, would have been quick to hop on that train, but no dice.

rue 15y ago
I'm not entirely familiar with what omnibox does, but there're a few search bar addons, and quickly testing on 11, typing "whuh" in the navigation bar goes to a Google search too. Personally, I just use vimperator (the clones of which on Chrome are…abysmal?) so I can o[pen]/t[abopen] and then type a search term (w/ customizable engine) or a URL. … Memorywise, the recent FFs are much better. Usually problems are caused by extensions.
robtoo 15y ago
I've had a look at Google's docs[1], and it's really not clear to me what Chrome's omnibox offers that Firefox's address bar (or whatever they call it) doesn't. http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95440 http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  I've got Aurora installed for Tor and flash-based apps that don't play nicely with Chrome, but I still use Chrome for my daily surfing and so have not really noticed any of the changes Mozilla has made. If the address bar really is reproducing the functionality of the omnibox, why not kill the search box all together? It seems like duplicated functionality and a waste of screen real estate.
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    Some of us actually like distinguishing between URLs/bookmarks/history and an autocomplete-with-search-engine-spying search facility. I don't view the trend of combining them into a single text box as a positive one, whichever browser is doing it.
  - robtoo 15y ago
    I think the only use for the search box now is to give people easy access to multiple (or a secondary) search engine. Sure, it's ugly, but it does give users a clear and simple way to search wikipedia for "widgets". Chrome, on the other hand, only exposes non-Google search engines through the search engine keyword thingy, which means a user has to actually type "en.wikipedia.org widgets" into the omnibox. Sure, tab-completion will do half the work, but the user still has to remember to start typing "en." rather than, say, "wikipedia". I know that Chrome (and, indeed, Firefox) allow you to edit those search engine keywords, but that is power-user territory, and power-users can edit their Firefox UI as well. http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png
    - Lazare 15y ago
      Minor quibble, but Chrome makes it pretty easy to change your default search engine to anything you want, including non-Google search engines. It's not that you need to use a keyword to search a non-Google search engine, it's that you need to use a keyword to search a non-default search engine. :)
captaincrowbar 15y ago
Apple are switching to a Chrome-style unified address/search bar in Safari 5.2 (now in beta).
thwest 15y ago
I have have better luck with awesomebar personally. My searches tend to hit words in URLs and titles of history before I actually want to duckduckgo. Omnibox also breaks my usage pattern for intranet (no tld) URLs.
kenmazy 15y ago
I also like chrome's omnibox, but I dislike their support for rss feeds as a bookmark (live rss) as well as their video adblock (doesn't work). For firefox, I use the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ addon, it works quite well for me. Now if only I could find a way to get firefox tabs into the title bar...

Silhouette 15y ago

Messing around with updates every few weeks is the single biggest thing pushing me away from Firefox as my default browser. (I do a lot of web development, so I routinely have four or five different ones installed. It's just a question of where I keep my serious bookmarks etc.) As a web developer, I'm fed up of the moving targets and unreliability. When Firefox pushes an update to everyone and breaks something fundamental, it's not the Firefox support desk that gets complained at when the web apps stop working. As a user, I see little real advantage from the breakneck pace of development anyway. Inevitably only a few sites use bleeding edge features within weeks of their appearance, and most of them seem to be web design/web development blogs showing off about bleeding edge features that might one day be useful to real web sites. Moving to silent updates, as done by Chrome, might reduce the hassle, but then we'll also see endless minor UI tweaks happening at apparently random times like Chrome, which is really annoying in itself. And of course if a major bug gets pushed out and breaks a site I care about as a visitor, it's just as annoying whether I manually updated (not that there's much choice if security patches stop for anything more than five minutes old) or it happened silently in the background. I never recommend Chrome or Firefox with the auto-updates. In fact, we explicitly don't provide customer support for them any more on several projects I work with, that conclusion being reached independently by several different development teams after experiencing all-too-similar problems. If anyone asks, I think the official recommendation in most cases is currently IE9.