I must admit I've fallen in love with Firefox over the years. But being one of the few avid netbook users,when light weight web browser was announced I was very intrigued.
Initially, I was turned off by the lack of customization to the Chrome UI and that there was not a NoScript extension. Now that there is a script blocking extension, NotScripts, I wanted to give Chrome another chance. Its speed and minimalist UI is the hallmark of the browser. While I love the speed, the minimalist interface is a little too minimal for me. The most significant problem being that the bookmarks are not easily accessible through the toolbar. I am unsure of it's future. As Google adds more "features" to Chrome will become bloated and lose its reputation as the light weight browser. Features such as speech-to-text I feel is something that should be handled by an extension rather than being implemented in to the core of the code. Though in all fairness, I must state that I am excited to see that they are bringing GPU-accelerated 3D effects in the forthcoming version. [http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/chrome-11-beta/]
Firefox has been great to me over the years. It is highly customizable and provides better complacency than IE. This biggest complaint that I and most people have is the memory usage of the browser. With FF4 this has not changed too much. Many have complained of the performance of the current iteration of FF and Mozilla has responded by telling their uses to remove addons that have been installed. My initial reaction was "WTF," the addons have been part of what has made FF so great. love highly customizable UI and addons, Mozilla suggest removing addons but that is what makes it great. But, the reality is that Mozilla can not be blamed for inefficient code in addons that they did not develop. Mozilla has published a chart of some of the most popular addons and their impact on startup, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/. Mozilla will indicated addons that increase load time by 25% on the addon page and, in future version of FF, in the extensions list. [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefox_slow_check_your_add-ons_says_mozilla.php] While load time is important, even more important to me is the performance once the browser is loaded. I have limited the addons for "normal" web browsing to only the most essential ones and have notices a performance difference. I have created a separate profile for web development to use such addons as Firebug.
Firefox 4 is far more compliant with web standards than its predecessor. Out of 10,456 tests at http://test262.ecmascript.org, FF3 failed 3,661 tests; FF4 only failed 301. And Chrome 10 failed 497. Another compliance check is the Acid 3 Test at http://www.acidtests.org/. FF3 got a 94 and FF4 did better with a 97, but Chrome got a solid 100. Both web browser do a decent job of being inline with web standards. [http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-293.htm]
Currently, I alternate between both browsers. There is no clear winner for me. Both have plugins to integrated services and features most significant to me; e.g. LastPass, XMarks, ReadItLater, script filtering. I would like to use Chrome as the browser for my Guest account on my Windows box because of its light minimalist desgin. But Chrome installs itself to the 'AppData' folder rather than the 'ProgramFiles' folder. As soon as I learn how to get around this problem, I will be sure to post it.
