I'm with Kllrnohj 100% on his defense of Firefox and its svelteness (except for his apparent ignorance of how to type "Windows'"). Wink I can't claim as extensive experience with Chrome as some of the rest of you, because I only slightly dabbled in it before deciding that Firefox was still fine for me, but I was among those very frustrated when Firefox was leaking and consuming RAM all over the place a few years ago. I too have had Firefox with many tabs and windows open for quite a few days, probably at least a week, and right now it's consuming a whopping 16% of my total system memory. Not too shabby in my opinion.
Personally, I've found that Chromium runs a bit better than the native 64-bit Linux version of Firefox, particularly in regards to the Flash plugin, but for the most part, neither really has much of an apparent advantage over the other for me. Firefox does have more plugins, but honestly I rarely use plugins, and never need them Wink
I switched to Chrome months ago because Firefox began to be unstable when closing out of random tabs, it would freeze for a few minutes than completely crash. I also rarely had more than 5 tabs open at a time in just window. After this became a daily thing, I uninstalled firefox and used IE8 for a few days until deciding to give Chrome a shot. Haven't looked back since.

I rather like the speed at which Chrome loads most things, even on dialup. Also, the tabs being in the very very top instead of taking up even more room on the screen is a definite nice feature.
Firefox is an awesome browser, and yes, it has addons that put Chrome extensions to shame. Even though I primarily use Chrome, I still use Firefox periodically for some of it's extensions... FireFTP ftw.

That said, I primarily use Chrome for a couple of reasons:

1) It starts up crazy fast, and the UI is generally wicked responsive. Even if Firefox technically takes up less resources, Chrome seems to be vastly more responsive, at least on my rig. When my friends look for browsers on slower machines, I always recommend Chrome.

2) I don't need ALL my extensions all the time. In Firefox, it's difficult to turn off extensions that you don't need atm... in Chrome, I leave most of my extensions off, quickly turning them on only when I need them, saving memory.

tifreak8x wrote:
Also, the tabs being in the very very top instead of taking up even more room on the screen is a definite nice feature.
Honestly, that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me; my monitor is large enough that the extra row is pretty much insignificant.

Kllrnohj wrote:
And over the past, oh, year or so. Chrome is the *only* browser that has crashed on me, and it happens far too often, which makes that "feature" a bug as far as I'm concerned.
I envy you; for me, even FF periodically crashes. Naturally, Chrome does crash (especially the beta channel that I use), but it doesn't happen often enough for it to be a real annoyance. Plus, when it does crash, it's no biggie to restore the few tabs that had to be killed.

swivelgames wrote:
IMHO, the list goes a little something like this:
Chrome
Firefox
Opera
Safari
Internet Explorer
Alike operating systems, I feel that naming the "best" browser really depends on the individual's needs... even lynx is a pretty handy browser when you want to scour mainly text-based sites using nothing but your keyboard. Ranking Firefox below Chrome is sort of silly when FF is soooo much more capable, even though Chrome might make more sense to you.
Ultimate Dev'r wrote:
Did you seriously just make the same grammar mistake twice in a row that I previously brought to your attention? SHAME ON YOU Bad Idea

inb4 mod edit.


Yes, yes I did.

You'll get over it.

Also, I could totally go through and remove all traces of my mistake Evil or Very Mad

Quote:
It starts up crazy fast


Seriously, get an SSD. Biggest upgrade you can do to improve responsiveness of the system. Its crazy

Quote:
the UI is generally wicked responsive.


Which is why it will never get the truly spectacular extensions. Firefox's extension system is so good because Firefox IS one giant extension. Firefox is rendered by Firefox.

Quote:
Chrome seems to be vastly more responsive, at least on my rig. When my friends' look for browsers on slower machines, I always recommend Chrome.


Chrome handles less CPU power better, which is why I use it primarily on my thin and light laptop.
Kllrnohj wrote:

Quote:
Chrome seems to be vastly more responsive, at least on my rig. When my friends' look for browsers on slower machines, I always recommend Chrome.


Chrome handles less CPU power better, which is why I use it primarily on my thin and light laptop.

a better one for that kind of situation would be Opera
since the newest opera even runs fine on my Pentium 1s!
Kllrnohj wrote:
Seriously, get an SSD. Biggest upgrade you can do to improve responsiveness of the system. Its crazy
I'm actually hoping to buy a new laptop in a month or two, so I'm just going to wait.
rthprog wrote:
Kllrnohj wrote:
Seriously, get an SSD. Biggest upgrade you can do to improve responsiveness of the system. Its crazy
I'm actually hoping to buy a new laptop in a month or two, so I'm just going to wait.
Are you going to get one with an SSD, or you just mean in terms of speed and upgradedness?
KermMartian wrote:
Are you going to get one with an SSD, or you just mean in terms of speed and upgradedness?
The latter. For the space I need, my only financially justifiable option would be your typical HDD... this will be my only machine, so I'm not exactly looking for an underpowered "thin and light" ultraportable.
rthprog wrote:
KermMartian wrote:
Are you going to get one with an SSD, or you just mean in terms of speed and upgradedness?
The latter. For the space I need, my only financially justifiable option would be your typical HDD... this will be my only machine, so I'm not exactly looking for an underpowered "thin and light" ultraportable.
Yeah, that's smart. I've been very happy with my eeePC with its nice 20GB of SSDs, but the price vs. capacity isn't good enough for me in a normal laptop yet.
Quick question; Do most students typically carry their laptops around all day? B/c taking all of your notes on a laptop almost seems tedious...
rthprog wrote:
Quick question; Do most students typically carry their laptops around all day? B/c taking all of your notes on a laptop almost seems tedious...
Well, I have a tablet PC, I constantly have my laptop with me. Taking notes on my tablet is not tedious at all, since I can either write or type. Smile
Kllrnohj wrote:
Things like Firebug, TamperData, Greesemonkey, etc, etc, etc...
Things like Firebug and Greesemonkey are readily available in Chrome. Chrome has it's own very useful developer tools. There are plenty of add-ons out there for developers as well. Just saying that Chrome isn't completely out of the game. Chrome has a perfectly acceptable selection, in my opinion. Firefox does however have Chrome beat in extensions. But I'm not a whore for extensions, either, so I don't mind using Chrome. But no, Chrome does not have TamperData.

rthprog wrote:
I envy you; for me, even FF periodically crashes. Naturally, Chrome does crash (especially the beta channel that I use), but it doesn't happen often enough for it to be a real annoyance. Plus, when it does crash, it's no biggie to restore the few tabs that had to be killed.
This. Although they both crash, I'm more affected by Fx's crashes and (it may just be me, but) I've experienced more crashes in Fx then I have in Chrome.

tifreak8x wrote:
I switched to Chrome months ago because Firefox began to be unstable when closing out of random tabs, it would freeze for a few minutes than completely crash. I also rarely had more than 5 tabs open at a time in just window. After this became a daily thing, I uninstalled firefox and used IE8 for a few days until deciding to give Chrome a shot. Haven't looked back since.

I rather like the speed at which Chrome loads most things, even on dialup. Also, the tabs being in the very very top instead of taking up even more room on the screen is a definite nice feature.
I'm with tifreak on this as well. Fx has always seemed unstable, in my experiences. I constantly experienced crashes with it, and after I moved to Chrome I haven't actually thought about going back to Fx because of how fast, and "stable" it feels.


Also, on the subject of tab isolation (Apologies for restarting this silly portion of the debate), seeing as all browsers crash at some point, it is quite logical to implement (and even advertise) features that aid in recovery after a crash. Tab isolation is a very nice feature. There's no reason for Google Chrome not to talk about it, since Fx doesn't have it. Everyone experiences browser crashes, and for Google Chrome to advertise their means of recovering (since no one has really proven that you can write a web browser that doesn't crash at some point... or an application for that matter) is perfectly acceptable. To criticize Chrome for advertising such features is retarded, seeing as it was a plus in marketing for them. And usability-wise, it has not once affected my experiences in a negative manner.


rthprog wrote:
Quick question; Do most students typically carry their laptops around all day? B/c taking all of your notes on a laptop almost seems tedious...
If you're talking about having to tug it around to each class, wait for it to boot, open up your text-processor of choice, and then have to shut everything down again and tug it to your next class, that would seem incredibly tedious. I bring my laptop to every class I can and just put it to sleep in between classes. My laptop boots up incredibly quickly so it doesn't take any time to pull it out of my bag, set it on my desk, and then start typing notes.

Randomy: Here's an interesting read on Solid-State, by the way.[/offtopic]
Not to drastically change the subject, but has anyone else seen The World web browser?

http://download.cnet.com/The-World-Browser/3000-2356_4-10813770.html

It's sorta neat, and somewhat fast from what I can see thus far. Going to try it out on dialup and see how fast it is there.

Edit:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Browsers/TheWorld-Browser.shtml

Found a seemingly more up to date version here.
http://www.ioage.com/en/index.htm
schoolhacker wrote:
a better one for that kind of situation would be Opera
since the newest opera even runs fine on my Pentium 1s!


Opera really isn't any easier on the resources than Chrome or Firefox. The big problem with Opera, though, is that the default settings were picked by complete retards and you can't change them. Some of the default behaviors I *HATE* with a passion and they don't let me change them.

swivelgames wrote:
Also, on the subject of tab isolation (Apologies for restarting this silly portion of the debate), seeing as all browsers crash at some point, it is quite logical to implement (and even advertise) features that aid in recovery after a crash. Tab isolation is a very nice feature. There's no reason for Google Chrome not to talk about it, since Fx doesn't have it. Everyone experiences browser crashes, and for Google Chrome to advertise their means of recovering (since no one has really proven that you can write a web browser that doesn't crash at some point... or an application for that matter) is perfectly acceptable. To criticize Chrome for advertising such features is retarded, seeing as it was a plus in marketing for them. And usability-wise, it has not once affected my experiences in a negative manner.


Firefox has a perfectly acceptable (and actually pretty good) crash recovery mechanism. Lets you restore all your tabs or a subset of tabs (prevent the tab causing problems from loading). Also, in Chrome if a plugin crashes Chrome takes down the whole tab. In Firefox when a plugin crashes, it just takes down the area where the plugin goes - you can still see the rest of the site.
Kllrnohj wrote:
Firefox has a perfectly acceptable (and actually pretty good) crash recovery mechanism. Lets you restore all your tabs or a subset of tabs (prevent the tab causing problems from loading). Also, in Chrome if a plugin crashes Chrome takes down the whole tab. In Firefox when a plugin crashes, it just takes down the area where the plugin goes - you can still see the rest of the site.
Wow... Kllrnohj actually made a statement that was blatantly false... I didn't know you had it in you. No offense, of course. I'm being far from sarcastic. I just want to soak up this moment here because it doesn't happen very often Very Happy

Chrome doesn't take down the whole tab if a plugin crashes, it simply does what you say Firefox does which is take down the area where the plugin goes. For instance, if Flash crashes on a YouTube the area where the video goes is simply replaced with a black background and the sad-puzzle-piece-face...thingy. (As seen below).



And in Chrome the whole browser doesn't crash... there's no need for you to recover the whole entire browser except the tab that crashed it because... the only thing that crashes is that process. And recovering (if you want to) is as simple as hitting the "Go" button in the address bar after the page has crashed. (or hitting back, either way. You just need to navigate).

I agree that Firefox has a pretty good crash recovery system, but the fact that the whole entire browser doesn't crash is a huge plus for Chrome, IMHO. Speed is key in crash recovery, and Chrome has it aced. The fact that plugins don't crash tabs in either browsers should just be discarded.


[side-note]
As for speed issues with the two, Firefox (I'm not sure if it's because it's eating up CPU, or what) is much slower the Chrome on all my machines. I will admit, and apologize if I contested against this, that Chrome does eat up a whole lot more memory. However, that is obviously unrelated to the speed and crash issues I frequently experience.
swivelgames wrote:
Wow... Kllrnohj actually made a statement that was blatantly false... I didn't know you had it in you. No offense, of course. I'm being far from sarcastic. I just want to soak up this moment here because it doesn't happen very often Very Happy

Chrome doesn't take down the whole tab if a plugin crashes, it simply does what you say Firefox does which is take down the area where the plugin goes. For instance, if Flash crashes on a YouTube the area where the video goes is simply replaced with a black background and the sad-puzzle-piece-face...thingy. (As seen below).

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3501/3808978189_f49a21bae4.jpg


Interesting, the last time a plugin crashed for me in Chrome (version 2 or 3, I think..?) it took down the whole tab. Clearly they fixed that Smile
Kllrnohj wrote:
Opera really isn't any easier on the resources than Chrome or Firefox. The big problem with Opera, though, is that the default settings were picked by complete retards and you can't change them. Some of the default behaviors I *HATE* with a passion and they don't let me change them.
One of the things I particularly like about Opera is just how customisable it is. What settings are you referring to?
The only thing I dislike about Opera is when you use CTRL+F search and start your query with a space (for example, if you want to search for the word " hello " instead of "*hello ", it crashes Opera.
  
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