Which browser do you use?

Now that it supports extensions, I've been playing around with Chrome recently. That got me to wondering what you folks here tend to use (sorry if this has been brought up before). Oh, and I didn't include IE6 on this list because really, come on.

Let me explain where I am right now.

I've spent a great deal of time and care to cater my Firefox browsing experience to my liking. I make sure to limit the number of extensions I have installed to only the ones that are essential to me. I have all my settings tweaked just the way I like it. If I had to set up a computer from scratch, it would probably take me about half an hour to get my Firefox installation set up just how I like it, and that doesn't count bookmarks (because I get those through XMarks).

So now I'm trying out Chrome, and naturally I'm bumping into lots of little things that are different from what I'm used to. On the whole, I like the browser a lot, and it does seem faster, especially with Google sites (and it's not faster just because I have extensions in Firefox).

For the most part, I've been able to replicate most of the add-ons I use in Firefox. I have extensions for bookmark syncing (XMarks, though it doesn't do passwords yet which is not good but that's Google's fault), ad blocking, and a couple other specialized ones like Cool Iris (neat image viewer) and WiseStamp (customizable signatures for my GMail correspondence).

There are a few apps that I would like to have in Chrome but aren't essential, like the "Better" apps from Lifehacker/Gina Trapani for sites like Google Reader, GMail, and Google Calendar.

Lastly, there are some big items missing that are keeping me from switching for good:

Smart Bookmarks Toolbar - I suppose this is my most-used app in Firefox, because it contains all the links I use on a regular basis. This lets me auto-hide my bookmarks bar, and reduce it to only the icons. This saves me vertical space for displaying web pages (I'm big on a minimal browser window) and horizontal space for displaying all my most-used bookmarks. I've attached three screenshots to illustrate this. The first is what the Chrome bookmarks toolbar looks like (it gives me like 8 visible bookmarks) and the last two (1, 2) are the two states of my Firefox Smart Bookmarks Toolbar. I can't find anything that even alters my Chrome bookmarks bar, and they don't even have an option for hiding the text and just showing the favicons.

DownThemAll! - The best download manager I've found yet. I don't really care about the speed improvements, and to be polite I usually limit how many streams it takes up to one or two, but it's the UI improvements that I like. My most-used context menu option in Firefox is "DTA One-Click." Basically, if there's a link to a file, I can right click it, choose this option, and DTA automatically starts saving it to my desktop and then closes its self. There's a couple other nice little features too, but that's the main think I like.

It bugs me that I can't even find a bookmarks bar or download manager extension for Chrome. Hopefully someone will tackle that soon. Until then, I think I'm going to have to stay with Firefox.


ps- The other reason I'd love to use Chrome is so that I can start using HTML5 for Youtube.

I've stuck to Safari, mostly due to the speed difference in launching and using it compared to Firefox on OS X. It also syncs my bookmarks to my iPhone and other Macs (via MobileMe), and has a decent built in RSS reader. I've also come to like the Top Sites feature, as I can tell at a glance what web pages in my favorites have updated content. Lets see, I also like the ability to enlarge form text boxes (like this posting box), and the built in web tools for inspecting elements on a page and tracking down performance issues.

It's also been nice to have the 64bit version running on Snow Leopard, as it also adds out of process plugins. This means when a plugin crashes, my browser doesn't. Safari also doesn't load plugins until the tab is active, so if I open a lot of links in new tabs to read later, one of them won't randomly start playing some random video or audio content. Lastly, ClickToFlash and HTML5 support has been two big things for me recently.

That about covers it for me. Been pretty happy with Safari over the years. Prior to it, Firefox was my main browser, going back to the Firebird beta days.

I switched from FF to Chrome as my main browser last week.

I use Safari in Mac OS, because in the end, it's the browser that sucks the least. All of the browser choices have issues, including Safari (no configuration in pop-up blocking, no javascript configuration, download management sucks, etc..)

But compared to Firefox there's just no question the browsing experience is better. It's faster and for the most part always has been. Firefox's UI, has improved much over the latest versions, but they still can't seem to use native Mac OS controls - that alone is enough reason for many people not to run it, including me. Any third-party skin only makes the browser look and perform worse in Mac OS than the default one by the way. Top Sites has been a big plus for Safari and isn't matched elsewhere - the Google implementation is crummy.

I've tried Chrome, but Gogle can't even get their release system down, so I don't trust them very much to have a capable ad usable product long term. I mean, I remember some people making a hoopla about the beta coming out, except I had downloaded the official beta from Google's own site months before. I couldn't find anything to indicate what was different between the versions. I see people talking about "Chrome 2, Chrome 3 and even Chrome 4 - I've never seen that version number used on their download page to clearly identify the browser, just some Microsoft-like insane build number system. I also hate the close buttons being on the wrong side of tabs (on the right instead of left). Maybe after I stuff it full of extensions to get it to do what I'd like I might give it another serious try.

Safari used to piss me off on a daily basis through the 3.x versions - buggy as hell, lots of crashers. 4.x has been decent, but it still uses more memory than I'd like. And even though many elements of it are quite fast, it still feels the the whole browser is running in s a single thread on a single processor sometimes. Lots of beachballs on a 2.93GHz Core2Duo with 4GB of memory.

I finally got fed up with Firefox consuming an insane amount of memory and CPU while it wasn't doing anything at all and switched to Chrome under my Mac at home and Linux at work, which encompasses about 99% of my GUI computer interaction.

Chrome really is much faster at most things, consuming less CPU and less memory. Notably, Firefox would stutter every ten seconds or so, which was really annoying with any online videos, and Chrome does not have that problem.

The BugMeNot extension for Chrome actually works better than the one for Firefox. Under Firefox, there is absolutely zero feedback from the extension. Under Chrome, it changes the username entry to a dropdown list of all the logins listed on BMN. It's very nice. Someone should "back"port it.

All that said, Chrome is irritating the crap out of me otherwise.

The UI is just terrible.

The window decoration is super-tiny, which makes it a chore to click on, for moving the window or bringing the window to the front. Under Linux, other than colors, it completely ignores the system settings and draws different buttons, in type, number, and design. Also, since the window title bar is gone, the only place that a web page's title shows is in the tab, and if you have more than a scant few tabs, the majority of the title is obscured, so I frequently have no idea what the title of the web page I'm looking at is. (You wouldn't think this would be a big deal — I certainly would have laughed at someone who said that — but it really is. I had no idea how often I looked at web page titles.)

Under Linux with Firefox, I frequently used the ability to select a URL in any application and middle-click to paste the URL into a browser window (not just the URL bar) to load that page. This is very quick, and doesn't work under Chrome. Someone wrote an extension to emulate it, but due to limits in the Chrome API, it requires that a real web page be loaded, which means that you can't do it with a new tab. There are extensions that will open a defined page on a new tab instead of the stupid New Tab page, but then the location bar is not focused when you open a new page, which means that Ctrl-L->type URL no longer works. This affects me dozens of times a day. Not only that, but the bug report/feature request about it is very dismissive of the complaint. (Basically, "whatever; we don't need to support something that every other Unix browser since Netscape 2 has supported." It reads very much like people who simply aren't familiar with Unix.)

All of the ad blocking extensions suck. There's no other way to put it. Basically, they all allow the ads to load, and then they remove them after the fact. This allows onload actions in ads to work, which makes the ad blocking far less effective. I've been seeing a lot of ads since switching, despite using the same filter list.

Seemingly every extension adds a button to the location bar. This wastes an inordinate amount of space.

The Xmarks extension doesn't work well if you have bookmarks with keywords. First, Chrome doesn't support keywords; it has an equivalent feature with it's "Search Engines", but Xmarks doesn't sync keyword bookmarks to there. More importantly, though, it will delete some of your keyword bookmarks. (Also, there are no tags for bookmarks, which I find that I was using more extensively in Firefox than I thought.)

Searching for everything (that isn't immediately obviously a URL) by default is incredibly annoying, and while you can change the search vendor from the default of Google, there's no way to disable it altogether. I had to create a new "search engine" entry that just tries to load the page that I entered. And the error pages are lousy. They are extraordinarily minimal. (Try loading http://this.page.does.not.exist/.) Any details of the error (like "connection refused" or "host not found" or whatever) are, by default, hidden within a collapsed element, so you have to click on the error page to find out what went wrong. (You might argue that this is why search is turned on by default, but that doesn't work for non-public URLs.)

I'm sure there's more, but that's all that immediately comes to mind. That said, none of that has overcome its superior performance.

I'm glad Safari ditched the tabs-on-top they used in the beta versions of 4. It's really a bad paradigm in use, even if it has some logic to it. Frankly, I don't hold much hope for Chrome in the browser wars. I don't think it's going to take away significant enough market from Firefox. I'm al for it if it helps eat away IE share, but that doesn't seem to be going down as fast as one would hope.

I think I'll stick with Safari for now. Adblocking in Safari also completely sucks - even when using the same adblock lists that people laud for the AdBlock Plus extension in Firefox.

I forgot to mention that as well. I'm pretty bugged about that. What I find even more annoying is that there's an extension for Chrome that does its best to pass its self off as the same as AdBlock for Firefox, when it it clearly is not the same (and not made by the same people).

So far I'm just not ready to move to Chrome. I love the speed improvement, which is noticeable, but it's just not enough.

Seamonkey. I'm probably the only one...

I'm happy enough with Ad Thwart in Chrome, I see very few ads with it. I am aware that it only gets to hide ads after they have been loaded, but in practice I don't even see the ads flash on the screen, they get hidden before I ever get to see them.

I use firefox with only the xmarks and mouse gestures. I don't care about any ad blocking or whatever. The only problem I have had was after the last update it was starting really slow and it was because they decided to change the proxy setting to auto for me. Then it kept searching for a proxy at startup. Changing it back to none fixed that.

At work, we are still stuck with IE6 (where I am when I visit the board most of the time). Really, we move at the speed of dinosaurs sometimes.

I still use Firefox at home. The memory issues have always been there, I just don't notice it anymore.

I wasn't referring to seeing the blink of an ad on the page before it gets removed; I'm actually still seeing a good number of ads that don't get removed at all, even including a few popups. I was running AdThwart for a while and unhappy with it, so I switched to AdBlock. I don't remember what I didn't like about AdThwart now, but maybe it's time to switch back.

I've already had several instances of annoyances from ads loading before being removed. Many times, I'm a little too fast (or slow, depending on perspective) in trying to click on a link on a page, because I'll try to click on a link, then the ads are removed, the link moves, and I've accidentally clicked on another link. It's very annoying.

IMO, it's very important that an adblocker not load the ads at all. There's too many times where a damn ad server is slow or non-responsive, and because the page I'm looking at was poorly written, it's waiting for the ad to load to finish displaying the page. That's just not acceptable. That's half the reason I use adblock on Firefox in the first place.


Ugh, I actually mentioned that possibility when I first started writing my initial post but removed it to keep it short. I can't believe a corporation wouldn't do everything they could to get off of IE6. I'm sure there's internal issues, but the security problems alone should be enough of a reason to get all your users off that awful browser.

Have you tried the portable Firefox? It works quite well, can accept most extensions I've tried, and there's even ways to get flash installed (for the longest time, my wife's company wouldn't even install flash for her). More importantly, the Portable Apps people are extremely good at keeping up with software updates. Whenever an app like Firefox gets updated, their portable version is never far behind.

Does anyone know how, in Chrome, to make Ctrl+right behave like every other instance in Windows? That's really annoying me now. Everywhere else in Windows, Ctrl+left/right skips to the beginning of words in either direction. In Chrome, Ctrl+left does that, but Ctrl+right skips to the ends of words to the right. I'm having difficulty figuring out why it even does that...

There are all kinds of issues of trying to get a new version of anything (problems with legacy software, 200k+ installs, etc). It is really easy (comparatively) to get specific installs for specific requirements (for instance, this laptop has all kinds of software not deployed to other folks). The good news is that the last time I saw an upgrade plan, we were slated to migrate to Win 7 and Office 2007 in March.

Are you guys regularly visiting porn sites or something? Why do you need to block all these ads?

Same thing under Linux. That feels like a bug to me. I bet it's in WebKit, though. Is that how MacOS does it? I forget; I don't use that feature.

If the web was filled with only banner ads, I probably wouldn't bother. But there are far too many sites that still use popups, use irritating animated ads, ads that use CSS to obscure the entire page, etc. That said, even the static ads often cause problems because, as Matt said, they often significantly delay the loading of a web page. (I'm pretty sure that Doubleclick must be running all of their ad serving off of a Pentium 90 on the other side of an ISDN link.)

Basically, it's a workflow efficiency thing. The fewer UI interactions, especially ones due to unrequested data, the better.

I'm still using Firefox. The high memory usage doesn't really bother me because I've got plenty of memory on all my machines. This obviously isn't ideal and it would be nice to have it consume less memory but it doesn't directly impact me so I've just ignored it. I've not noticed it using much CPU though.

Apart from that, I'm happy with how it works, the way the UI looks and the extensions available. I use Adblock Plus, Image Zoom and Web Developer. At one point I did have Greasemonkey running but when I upgraded to Windows 7, I never bothered to put it back on and didn't really miss the tweaks.

Definitely Firefox for most of my browsing, with Chrome for SWMBO and quick browsing when necessary. HTML5 for youtube etc under Chrome is horrible - fails far too often, so I usually don't bother with it for that.

Ads annoy me and as mentioned above, only FF cuts them accurately and completely. It is a CPU hog, but killing it every couple of hours, if you haven't already closed it for some other reason, does the job just fine.

[update]

Looks like Chrome is getting there with the plugins, especially (as mentioned above) the Lifehacker ones. My wife's chrome instance ain't too bad now.

Camino on OSX. I'm probably the only one too.

I used to use Camino. Then I switched to Safari once Safari stopped completely sucking (version 3).

I'm in that boat too. IE6 only and some internal things definitely do break on IE7 or IE8. Hell, we are only just getting XP SP3 pushed to our machines just now and the reason only seems to be the Microsoft is dropping support for XP SP2. I'd already upgrade to SP3 - forget that. We can't use Windows Update - it's disabled and requires updates to be pushed.

I ran some stats on the weblogs (using awstats) for the past week, though unfortunately the stats tools lacks understanding for any more recent browser so I can't post an exact breakdown. Keep in mind this also includes people hitting the site from various search engine searches.

Firefox leads with a 40.4% share. 20% of the total is from 3.6, with the next largest at 14.4% on 3.5.8. All other versions are tiny, but go all the way back to version 0.8!

IE is in second place with 24.2%. 10.2% is IE8, 5.8% is IE7 and 7.6% is IE6. IE 2.0 is the oldest reported.

From here, the breakdown falls apart. Safari shows 23.9%, but no version breakdown. Chrome identifies as Safari, so thats part of it, and all iPhone traffic is in there too. Netscape 5 comes in at 4.7%, and Opera comes in at 3.1%. And unknown is at 1.4%.

OS breakdown shows 62.7% on Windows, 20.8% on Macs, and 9.8% on Linux. 6.4% is unknown.

Windows breakdown is iffy, but shows 35.6% on XP, 9.3% on Vista, and what I'm guessing is a combination of 7 and NT4 at 12.8%.

Oh, and as far as traffic, about 15% is from search engine referrals. I found the top search phrases interesting:

adjusting my stock turbo 2005 subaru legacy
youtube no sound
no sound on youtube
las vegas songs
how to open zip files on iphone
headphones for sleeping
songs about las vegas
songs about vegas
windows server 2008 dlna
vegas songs

I'll have to see about getting a better version of the program to try and break down some of it more.

Ok, newer awstats, and all data from February. It's still not properly separating Safari from Mobile Safari, but it does report Chrome properly and sees the Android browser.

Firefox: 42.2%
IE: 25.8%
Safari: 10.2%
Chrome : 10%
Netscape : 4.4%
Opera : 4.1%
Android : 0.8%

OS breakdown:
Windows: 67.6%
Mac: 18.5%
Linux: 9.1%
Unknown: 3.4%

Windows breakdown (Percentage of all OSes):
WinXP : 37.7%
Vista : 10.2%
7 : 14.7%

I gave up on Chrome, at least under Linux. I was willing to live with the irritations if the performance was going to be better, but it got to the point where Chrome would consume as many resources as Firefox, albeit split between many processes instead of just one, at which point it would become flakier than Firefox ever was. The separate processes might have been a benefit if it were possible to figure out which pieces were associated with which processes, but I couldn't find a way to do that.

Anyway, back to Firefox for now. I'll try again after a few versions have passed.

Doesn't "about:memory" show you ?

Why is there not an emoticon for "sheepish"?

That is twice today you've made me laugh out loud, in a good way.

College Humor on browsers

Even better than about:memory is View > Developer > Task Manager. All it really needs for me is a real firebug replacement.

You're aware of View (or Dog-Eared Page) → Developer → Developer Tools, right? It's not Firebug, but it's a long way towards it.

Yes, it's fine for most things, but it's main shortfall in my book is that it just show applied CSS, and doesn't show you the inheritance and location of the style in the css file.