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I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since way back when it was called Phoenix and the install procedure consisted of “unzip this file somewhere and double click the .exe”. About a year ago, I decided to try using Google Chrome as my default browser for a few weeks, and ended up sticking with it. When Firefox 4.0 RC was released a couple weeks ago, I decided to repeat the experiment to see what changed since 3.6. This time though, I’m changing my mind. These are my reasons why. I can easily imagine someone reading this article and thinking to themselves (or writing in the comments) something like, “These are all trivial! You can fix them with extensions!” They would be half right. Most of these are minor complaints, and this just shows how far web browsers have come. Mozilla’s mission is to make the web better, and they’re doing a fine job. However, not all of these things are fixable with extensions

Sidebar: Firebug and Web Development

Let’s get this bit out of the way first: I spend a lot of time in Firebug and in Chrome’s Developer Tools. I think both equally capable, so which one you use pretty much comes down to which UI you prefer. My personal favorite here is Firebug, which means my Firefox install isn’t going anywhere — In fact, the only reason I didn’t give Firefox 4 a try sooner was because I was waiting for a version of Firebug that worked with it! However, keep in mind that this article is discussing the web browser I use for day-to-day surfing, not development or debugging. (Isn’t it nice that we even have such options these days?)

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