Google Chrome vs. FireFox

Lately there have been a lot of reviews comparing FireFox to Chrome. I have been using chrome pretty heavily for the past few months so I thought I would share my personal experiences and how I feel about the two as a whole.

Chrome Benefits

I haven’t personally run any benchmarks but it appears fairly clear to me that under virtually every circumstance I have seen, Google Chrome handles JavaScript considerably more quickly than FireFox.

I have also noticed that it seems to run more quickly as a whole. It takes less time to start up and doesn’t appear to lag as much on loading web pages.

It renders pages the way they are meant to be rendered and so far it is the only browser I have seen that passes the Acid 3 test. If I am wrong on this please let me know. 

Chrome Problems

While I can’t complain about Chrome overall there are still many reasons I generally use FireFox over Chrome. One of the most obvious problems is that I’ve noticed on occasion when dealing with flash Chrome will freeze up. The same flash app in FireFox appears to work fine. I have also noticed some odd behavior in which under limited circumstances Flash can leave artifacts on the Chrome Window.

The biggest reason, however, why I still keep and generally choose to use FireFox is the extensions. There are so many great extensions which I can’t see myself living without. Until Google can get some form of plugin system effectively integrated into Chrome I can’t see myself ever replacing FireFox with Chrome completely. I will, however, use it for normal day to day surfing.

Why not IE

I won’t compare IE to either of these browsers because honestly I don’t see a comparison. I use IE only for the purpose of testing my websites to verify they work in IE. Outside of that I avoid it due to the fact that it offers limited plugin support and it’s slow.