Weaning Myself Off of Firefox

I have been a Firefox user for many years to the point where I don’t ever open an Internet Explorer Browser lately, but with Firefox having more and more problems with Flash, Javascript and other websites causing the browser to render slowly or crash I find myself using Google Chrome more and more often for casual surfing and turning to Firefox only for the Firebug and other addons that offer debug and advanced functionality.  Google Chrome however is nearly caught up in addons and I compared a few addons that were identical between Firefox and Chrome and found the same addons cause worse performance problems with Firefox than they do with Chrome.  In addition I grew tired of my Firefox browser consuming over 700mb of RAM if I leave it open for more than five hours and just do a casual amount of surfing and work on the browser.

So I decided to try and make a full switch to Google Chrome by setting it as the default browser, and I found that my instinct is to Open Firefox.  For some reason I still find the simplistic Chrome interface a little foreign and the browser is outside of my “comfort zone”.  I do notice that everything works faster in WordPress (Editor mode), Uploading images…etc are all faster in Google Chrome than with Firefox 3.6 and I am trying to retrain my instincts to open Firefox to instead focus on using Chrome exclusively.

So far I haven’t run into anything that has caused me trouble in Google Chrome and other than the extra addons I had like Alexa Bar, FireBug, YSlow and such for Firefox, I am exclusively using Google Chrome.  I even installed the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Chrome and the SEOQuake Toolbar which runs much faster on Chrome than on Firefox.

My initial testing of Firefox 4 Beta 1 showed the browser to be highly unstable and not ready for public release, but I am hoping that Mozilla can catch up and improve its speed and performance with Firefox 4 and regain some of its internet glory that it lost to Opera and Chrome over the past few years.  In case you didn’t know, all the major sites are touting that Chrome and Opera are the fastest browsers on the web right now and in my own tests you can surf faster with Chrome and Opera.

I actually have five browsers installed on my machine (Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10.6, FireFox 3.6, Google Chrome, and Gecko).  I use all of these browsers to test how my sites render on various browsers, but I also use them to handle multiple sessions.  I need to be logged into 2 Google Analytics or Google AdSense accounts at the same time, or 2 separate Twitter accounts.  Because all applications set 1 cookie only, you can’t have multiple user sessions in the same browser space to the same application so this forces me to work with multiple browsers at the same time at night when I am doing a variety of administrative work for my own blogs and my wife’s blogs at the same time.

In the end I really think the Google Chrome browser is pretty fantastic.  What is your favorite browser and why?

-Justin Germino