Chrome vs Firefox

Friday, March 20, 2009 by Dave Winer.

Just read this opinion piece that says that Chrome is much faster than Firefox and that Firefox "lost the plot" and is going in the wrong direction and pretty soon Firefox will die, having been killed by Chrome.  

I use Firefox, I've tried Chrome, and it looks nice, but I can't switch to it because: 

1. It isn't available for the Mac, and while I do use Windows, my primary environment is Mac. 

2. It doesn't run Firefox plug-ins. There are a few must-have plug-ins that I can't live without. 

3. Probably it's missing other features I depend on in Firefox but I haven't spent enough time running it to find out. 

Okay now to "lost the plot" -- what is Firefox doing? I can't quite figure it out. They do a lot of releases, every time I get a new one it takes me to a page where it says it's the safest way to browse the web. Safety is important, I had forgotten how important until I had a machine get infected a short while back. But what else? I've noticed the latest version of Firefox is pretty crashy. That's not good.  

The last thing I want to do is to use Google's browser, I already depend too heavily on them. So there's a lot of resistance here to switching from Firefox.  

And I know, as a software developer, that apps start slowing down when they implement all the features they need to be competitive. It's conceivable that the great performance of Chrome is due to the fact that it hasn't matched Firefox in features. 

On the other hand, Firefox hasn't shipped a feature that I care about in a long time. 

However, neither has Chrome. It's an amazingly boring app for something reconceived from the bottom-up, as they claim it is. Not even one user-facing great new feature? How long has it been since any browser shipped a feature that made a difference to users? Not just safety, which is important as I said, but something fun and empowering?? 

I think we're at a point where everyone has lost the plot. We're so concerned with malware and who's killing who, we forgot to move forward in interesting and fun ways. Or am I missing something.