Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome: A Researcher’s PerspectiveMozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome: A Researcher’s Perspective

I really like both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. They each have a few pros and cons that stand out in my mind, for my purposes, which is mostly to do research. In the end, I believe Firefox is the better browser, but it has borrowed from and could still learn a thing or two from Chrome.

For some time, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have been my principle web browsers. In the past, I used Internet Explorer almost exclusively, but almost never use it at all anymore. The reason I stopped using it is because it was so unstable. It crashed on me constantly. I tried everything I knew how, including uninstalling and reinstalling the latest version, but to no avail. It just crashed constantly, so much that it was virtually useless for my purposes. So I downloaded Firefox, and I’ve never turned back. It’s possible later versions of IE are now more stable. But I see no reason to go back to IE from either Chrome or Firefox, and until IE comes up with some innovation that would motivate me to do so, I will probably continue to never use it.

Most anyone who uses Firefox probably knows one of its nice features is the use of add-ons to perform a wide variety of tasks. I personally don’t use many. But one add-on that I find very useful is the DownloadHelper. This allows you to download video files from sites like YouTube, and will even convert them for you from .flv to .mpg or .avi or your preferred video file format.

As another example, if I want to take a screenshot with Chrome, I have to open a paint program and paste that clipboard image in, crop it, resize it, etc. in order to create an image file from it. Firefox has an add-on called Screengrab that lets you save a screenshot at the click of a button. You would still have to crop it and resize it if necessary in another program, but just to quickly save a page as an image for later use, this add-on is very convenient.

Add-ons like these (and there are tons and tons more, I just don’t use very many) are one reason Firefox is a great browser. Chrome, on the other hand, doesn’t have add-on capabilities. I can’t download video files with Chrome and I’m stuck with using “ctrl-alt-PrtSc” to capture a page as an image.

Tabbed browsing is standard for browsers now, and both Firefox and Chrome naturally use tabbed browsing. However, when working with a large number of open web pages in Firefox, it becomes very unstable. It freezes up a lot and sometimes crashes. Chrome does much better here. I can work with dozens upon dozens of tabs and it’s perfectly stable. Furthermore, if a single web page causes a problem or a single tab crashes, only that tab crashes. Instead of the whole browser closing down, just that tab is closed. Firefox has a nice feature where it will try to recover all previously opened web pages after a crash. Chrome may also have that feature, but this is never necessary in the first place with Chrome.

Both browsers have an option for when you start the browser to either open your home page or the last pages that were open at the time you last closed the browser. For Chrome, you just set this on or off as an option. For Firefox, the option comes as a pop-up when you exit. However, I’ve noticed that after I’ve rebooted my computer, while Chrome will still open all previously open tabs, Firefox does not. It works for me if I close it and re-open it. But if I reboot between exiting and restarting Firefox, it doesn’t restore my previous history. This largely defeats the purpose of that option for me, since most of the time I need to exit my browser with numerous tabs still open is when I need to shut down my computer or reboot before I am done with those open pages.

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