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

I often save web pages for research purposes. While I enjoy Chrome more than Firefox for its stability when using multiple tabs, web page saves often don’t work. Chrome for whatever reason saves some web pages as some kind of unreadable file when saving as a single web page. Saving files as “HTML only” in Chrome, a certain number of pages inevitably fail to save properly. This never occurs with Firefox. Since the majority of the time I spend using my web browser is spent researching, this single failing of Chrome is enough to make me prefer Firefox.

Another thing I liked about Chrome more than Firefox was the ability to tear off tabs. This was great for organizing many open web pages for maximum convenience. With Chrome, you can not only re-order tabs, but pull them off into a new window. Then you can pull tabs from one window and put them in another. This is a very nice feature that I had wished Firefox would include. But with the release of version 3.5, Firefox has borrowed that feature and so it is no longer a reason to prefer Chrome over Firefox.

The same thing goes for the URL window. Chrome’s window serves also as a search bar, which is nice. I don’t think Firefox had that feature previously, but it does now with version 3.5. At the same time, I like Firefox’s dedicated search bar (separate from the URL window), because you can choose different search options. I can do a Google search, search Wikipedia, or look up a word instantly with the Merriam-Webster search add-on. The idea of making a single window for both the web address and search is nice, but given the choice, I’ll choose having both in Firefox for this reason.

There are numerous other differences between Firefox and Chrome, but these are the ones I notice most as they are the differences that actually affect my use considerably. Where they differ elsewhere, I either don’t use that option or have no preference of one over the other. I like Chrome’s cleaner and less cluttered appearance and rarely use Firefox’s more inclusive menu options.

In sum, my default browser is Firefox. The reason why it is not Chrome comes down to the fact that Chrome doesn’t save all pages properly. As a researcher who saves files for future reference, this is a major failing. If it weren’t for that, I would use Chrome because of it’s stability. While Firefox crashes on me quite often, I never once had Chrome crash, only individual tabs. My solution is just to keep my open tabs down to a dozen or less with Firefox. But that’s less of an inconvenience than saving files as HTML only to discover later that I can’t open them.

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