I’ve previously talked about my switch to using Google Chrome and my primary web browser, and for a few months of almost constant use—even to type this post—I have enjoyed it. Chrome’s speed increase over Firefox not only relieves frustrations, but it increases my productivity. Pages load faster, a DOM viewer and Javascript inspector is built into the browser, it is open source, and there is a decently stable release branch for Ubuntu. And, within the last few weeks plugins were available for it in Ubuntu, so Flash works now.
But while all that sounds awesome, I unfortunately cannot remove Firefox yet. Two reasons:
- Using Firebug in Firefox is the only way I know of to view the response of an AJAX call without hard-coding in outputting the response via an
alert()or something. It is very frustrating, but Chrome’s document inspector only tells you where an AJAX call was made to, not whether it succeeded or failed, or what the response was. This is crucial to debugging web apps. - Firefox is a mature project and very, very rarely has any problems. It’s true that Firefox is indeed a tad bit slower at just about everything, but I almost never have problems with it and often have to switch to open up Firefox because Chrome has crashed or is behaving awkwardly.
At work I use Firefox 3.5 on Windows, and that seems to almost keep up with Chrome, so once Karmic (Ubuntu 9.10) is released, I’ll have to give it another try.