Keith Eckstein

A History Trip…. Can you remember way back in the depths of time when Firefox was version 1.5 and was really the only alternative to Internet Explorer apart from Opera (which would have been moving from the advert displaying version to the non-advert displaying version at around about that time if my memory is not misleading me) and Ubuntu hadn’t taken off and Netbooks didn’t exist unless, like me, you were sad enough to remember the Toshiba Libretto (great machine, by the way!)

I guess we’re talking about the back-end of 2005 because it was then that I was given an old laptop and my three years of not owning a PC came to an end.

I ran Windows NT on that laptop – I think it only had 128MB of ram so I was limited in my OS choice. I’d have loved to run Linux but the internal modem wouldn’t work with any of the distributions that I tried and so, unhappily, I gave up. Internet Explorer ran like a pig on the laptop and I used a combination of Opera and Firefox depending on my whim.

In February 2006 I bought a “proper computer” and immediately wiped the French installation of XP and installed Suse Linux. I imagine that Firefox was the default browser with Suse; to be honest, I can’t remember. I do know that since then, the only times I have used Internet Explorer have been on client’s machines (and I always try to encourage that they see the light and change to FireFox) or on the virtualised test environments that I need to maintain purely for website testing purposes.

Four Things that were good about Firefox.

1).  It was nice to feel smug about having a more secure browser.  I’ll admit it, I enjoyed being able to be smug when in the presence of IE users.

2).  The extensions.  You could customise your Firefox just as you might customise a car or re-decorate a house.  But, it cost you nothing!

3).  Tabbed browsing!  How did we ever cope before tabbed browsing.  Actually, I do have one memory of being at work in London and having 20 or so instances of IE loaded and spending weeks (perhaps I exaggerate slightly) trying to find the right one.

4).  It was also nice to know that Microsoft (or any other evil empire, for that matter) wasn’t getting any money for the browser you were running.

Five things that went wrong with Firefox.

1).  Code bloat?  I’ve not actually looked at the code that goes to make up Firefox but I’ll be my bottom dollar (not that I have any dollars, bottom or top) that it’s grown exponentially since those early days.  It’s a sad fact that code bases do get out of control.  In fact, wasn’t that what happened to Netscape’s Mozilla Suite that got transformed into Firefox?  Or am I getting my history wrong?

2).  Too many extensions?  I know that we don’t have to install them all but, the sheer range of extensions was a great temptation, wasn’t it?

3).  Resources hog?  Sort of ties in with code bloat; I’d see Firefox use up to 500 MB of RAM on my machine.  Just so it could display some HTML, display a few images and perhaps run some javascript or flash?

4). Speed?  Sorry but if I have to wait for the program to load; if it takes time to change focus from one tab to another, I’m going to get annoyed.  By the time I changed from Firefox to Chrome I was getting annoyed an awful lot of the time.

5). Screen area.  Just switching from Chrome to Firefox during a working session shows how much larger Chrome feels.

Too good, to start with!

Of course, when Chrome came along I wasn’t too impressed. I had to run it on a Windows machine, it had a strange minimalistic interface and, worst of all, it would display all the errors in my html!

Back then I was hand coding my sites (they were all static; I’d yet to discover WordPress!) and on one site I had about 100 pages, all copied from the same template – a template where every <h2> was terminated with a </h3>!

Unfortunately there were valid <h3></h3> pairings so I couldn’t just do a global search and replace.

The work involved in sorting out my own silly mistake made me dislike Chrome intensely!

However, if I’d coded properly in the first place……

And what was Firefox and IE doing letting me get away with badly coded HTML?

I kept reading about how fast it was and, at the same time, started to realise how slow my Firefox installation was becoming.

I do have to admit that I was running about ten million extensions (perhaps I exaggerate slightly) which can’t have helped.

It was in November 2009 that I realised that I’d have to do something.

I’d just started A Taste of Garlic (a blog review site) and the way I work when I’m writing posts for that site is to have lots (and I mean lots) of tabs open at the same time.  This would cause FireFox to grind to a halt.

I bit the bullet and, as soon as the Beta version for Linux was announced in December 2009, I installed it and started using it for 90% of my web development tasks.

Extensions

Of course, I still needed Firefox for the functionality that wasn’t available in Chrome at the time.  I’m mainly thinking screenshots here.  Thus I would keep a copy of Firefox running so that I could use the Screengrab extension.  Also, I use Photoxpress.com for their free photo stock (you can get 10 photos a day free of charge) but the “I have read the terms and conditions” button didn’t show up in Chrome until 5.0.

But, a few months ago, with the release of version 5.0 of Chrome, I found that all the really must have extensions were available for me to install.

Please bear in mind that I now no longer consider that it is vital to have an extension to show me my adsense earnings or to display my IP address.  I can always find those things out, if I want to know.

I also have learned to live without coloured tabs.  I’m not too sure how I ever managed to cope without tab pinning though – that really has changed the way I work!

With Firefox you can get pinned tabs but you need to install an extension to get them.  With Chrome, they’re there by default.

I also prefer the way that Chrome handles history but, I’m buggered if I can explain why?  I should mention that I didn’t like it at first but it now seems natural.  Perhaps I’ve adjusted or perhaps it is the right way and I was just slow to see it?

The extensions that I do use are as follows….

Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate - Version: 1.2.4

Color Pick - Version: 0.0.1.16

MeasureIt! - Version: 1.1.2

Pendule - Version: 0.0.10

RGB/HEX Color Generator - Version: 1.0.1

Of those I could probably lose Color Pick and RGB/HEX Color Generator as I have other tools that can do that for me.

So, not very many extensions.  Is that because I actually didn’t really need all the extensions that I used to run under Firefox or is it because Chrome just does so many things right, out of the box?

Conclusion…

For me, I’m as happy as I was back in the day when I moved from Internet Explorer to FireFox.  I’m determined not to install the Must Have extensions as I did with FireFox.

There are still some things that annoy me but these are so minor that I’m probably just being picky?

For example, I don’t like the bar that appears at the bottom of the screen when you download a file.  That can’t be changed.  I know when I download something and would prefer to have an additional dialogue box that I could load should I need to check on the progress of the download.

I also find that occasionally, I lose the icon graphics whilst working in WordPress.  This doesn’t matter a great deal as I know what each icon does (and I do most of my WordPress work separately in a text editor anyway) but, it’s a little niggle.  It only happens after a long session with loads of tabs open anyway and the answer is to close Chrome and start again.

I could also use a way of bookmarking all open tabs; that may be possible but, if it is, I haven’t found out how to do  it yet.

But, over all, I’m happy with Chrome.

I tend to use a web browser for upwards of 10 hours a day; for work, for work, for work and, occasionally, for pleasure.

It’s vital to me that the browser works well and in the way that I want it to work.

For me, Chrome does just that, for most of the time.

I prefer the interface (now that I’m used to it) and Firefox now seems clunky and overburdened with menus by comparison.

I find that, just as I was a Firefox evangelist a few short years ago, I’m now encouraging people to change to Chrome.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll stick with Chrome, until, of course, something better comes along – perhaps FireFox light?  Perhaps Safari?  I’m not sure.  What I do know is that we have moved on from those days when most of us could only run IE6 or Firefox 1.5.

Is Chrome is the new Firefox?  Maybe?

Are Browsers are now better than ever before?  Definitely!

All the best

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