In praise of Firefox

Yeah, like the world needs another blog praising Firefox. For what its worth, I used Firefox before it was alpha, back when it crashed all the time. So when I switched away from Firefox (in favor of Camino) it was kind of a big deal — symbolic at the least. My main reason for switching to Camino was that I felt that Firefox was getting sluggish — slow startup and slow operation. I checked the Activity Monitor on my iBook, which indicated that Firefox was consuming a lot more memory than Camino after viewing the same kinds of pages and being open for the same amount of time. So I switched.

The main thing that you give up when you use Camino instead of Firefox is extensions. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could live without them. I’d grown to rely on Performancing, del.icio.us and a few other extensions for day to day work. But of course their are bookmarklets. I installed 3:

1. post to del.icio.us
2. ectoize
3. Press It (for WordPress.com)

and then I didn’t really miss the extensions anymore (although I was jealous that I couldn’t use Google Notebook or Google Synchronizing) in my preferred browser. The main thing that you get when you use Camino instead of Firefox is integration. Camino is written in Cocoa and it can feel quite a bit more responsive. It also has more Aquafied HTML elements (shiny buttons and dropdown menus, etc.) and better OS X services integration.

But there are advantages to using Firefox beyond extensions. Several of them, and over time they grew so compelling that I switched my default browser. They include:

• Firefox is an informal standard. New web applications are written to work in Firefox and IE. Period. They may work in Camino, Safari, Opera, Shiira or other browsers, but they will definitely work in Firefox. While the performance of Camino was acceptable compared to past experiences when using Ajax web apps (it was certainly better than Safari or even older versions of Firefox), there were problems. I don’t have these problems with Firefox.
• It’s easy to add (1) new search engines and (2) new quick searches to Firefox. I missed typing “wp thing” for the Wikipedia entry on “Thing,” or “dict thing” for the dictionary.com definition of “thing.”
• Firefox gives you one-key multi-word page searching. Hit “/” and start typing, and Firefox will find it on the page. Camino has this to an extent, but you can only search for one word at a time.
• Firefox lets you rearrange tabs. Big plus.
• If a page element is inserted via JavaScript, most browsers don’t let you view the HTML created by the script (they just show the <script src=…> part. But in Firefox, if you highlight a piece of a webpage and select “view selection source” you can see that HTML. This is very useful for CSS and XHTML coding, debugging, etc.

And finally, I realized this important fact about Firefox:

If you don’t install extensions, Firefox uses a lot less memory, and works substantially faster

I don’t think that many of the people that complain about Firefox’s performance realize this fact. But as I explained, you can live without extensions — they’re just eye candy, and bookmarklets get the basic job done. So unless you have special needs (there are some extensions that I would use every day if I was, for example, a practicing web developer), you can do yourself a huge favor by ditching the extensions.

I thought these things deserved some pointing out. Most people rave about Firefox, but they overlook the more subtle, useful details that can make the browser so valuable.