5 Reasons Why I Would Never Switch to Firefox

No doubt, Firefox is a good browser. But, in my opinion, it’s not the best. I personally love Chrome a lot and I often wonder why people don’t migrate to Chrome. I’m not against Firefox, I just want to tell you that there’s a better option. You may reverse question me, why don’t you switch to Firefox? I do have some valid points, read on!

#1. Interface

I love playing with Chrome tabs, they are that flexible. You can rearrange them easily, drag them or merge them. Firefox interface has evolved a lot, especially Firefox 4.0 was a real breakthrough.

You may know about the recent theme Firefox is working on, that’s Australis and the next versions of Firefox would come with that theme preloaded. Now Australis’ interface is appealing but it resembles a lot with Chrome, for example the curvy tabs and light colors are used by Chrome initially. It seems Firefox is also copying Chrome for its interface.

#2. Start Page

Start page or a New Tab page is one of the basic features the Chrome browser and Firefox doesn’t have one. I know, there are many add-ons like Speed Dial which can provide an elegant start page but like everyone but I don’t prefer add-ons in the first place. If you’re using Chrome Dev or Canary, you might know about the new start page the Chrome team is working on. It’s much better than the previous one in terms of UI.

#3. Apps

Apps are different from extensions/add-ons, they are actually introduced for Chromebooks but now they can be installed on the Chrome browser itself. You may consider apps as slightly modified websites, for example, the SpringPad app and the Angry birds app for Chrome gives offline access (which is not available in other browsers) unlike the native websites.

#4. Instant Pages

This is a Chrome-only feature by Google. Whenever you search on Google, it pre-renders the webpage of the first search result, so it will take only a nano second (that’s 10 to the power of -9) to load, irrespective of your internet speed (even on a Dial-up connection). Unless and until Mozilla teams up with Google to support this feature in Firefox, Instant Pages will be Chrome-only.

#5. Mozilla’s history of borrowing from Chrome..

Whenever any Chrome feature ends up as a big hit, Mozilla starts working on it. This is not new, there are many instances and here are some of them.

• LessChromeHD: When Chrome released Compact Navigation feature, just then Firefox released LessChromeHD which can be found in Mozilla Labs.
• Channels: Remember? Chrome was the first to classify browsers based on the frequency of updates, that’s channels and Firefox copied this very soon.
• Firefox Sync: Chrome Sync is one of the oldest features of Chrome and Firefox started supporting sync with its 4.0 version.
• Instant Preview: Chrome has developed Chrome Instant and it’s available even in the most stable release of Chrome, while Mozilla is working on Instant Preview which is still in Mozilla Labs.

Conclusion

These are just the major features Firefox is missing, but apart from these there are also features like Chrome Profiles (Profiles doesn’t have a GUI in Firefox), Auto-Translate, Auto-Fill, Cloud Print, frequency of updates and many more.

Chrome also misses some features like toolbar customization and Panaroma, but there are not many. Finally, at the end of the day, it all comes to personal choice but rising popularity of Chrome shows what people are choosing.

Which is your primary browser? Firefox or Chrome? Or something else? Do drop in your comments.