Maybe I should disclose that I’m a hardcore Firefox user when 3.0 was released back in 2008. But after a year of using Chrome, I don’t think that matters anymore. I’m just as passionate about Google’s WebKit adaptation known as Chrome as I am about the best open source alternative.

Firefox 4 is as customizable as always. Adblock actually works. And having the most basic option of restricting the offline cache is definitely nice. It’s not like you didn’t know what was coming. It took Mozilla almost 3 years to go from Firefox 3 to Firefox 4 and there was like 12 betas and 2 release candidates. So I knew what I was getting into right off the bat.

Anyways, Firefox 4 is nothing revolutionary. It certainly isn’t faster than the latest Chrome. But it is stable and handles memory well, and its JavaScript performance is where a modern browser is anticipated to be. The fact that after 10 major versions of Chrome and Google still only allows cache-related changes by using a shortcut parameter hack is concerning (no way of doing this in Mac OS X). I hope it’s something they’ll address sooner or later.

Benchmarks:

• Lifehacker
• ZDNet
• TechRadar
• Digital Trends

I do wish Mozilla shipped Firefox 4 with some different default settings. But I have to fix the common annoyances of any browser I download so I guess that’s not too big of a deal.

There’s no reason not to use Internet Explorer 9 if you’re a Windows user or Safari 5 if you’re a Mac user. But if you’re a cross-platform guy like me and the ability to sync across the board (native, not some Xmarks BS) is important to you then it basically boils down to Chrome, Firefox and Opera.

More choices = good.

PS: Just check out this vertical space! I did it with Windows XP, similar results are possible with other OSs by just moving the buttons and awesome bar into the tabs bar and then unchecking “tabs on top”. Don’t need to modify userChrome.css or anything, since that stylesheet is only affecting Windows systems.

PSS: I guess the hype wore off on me. 2 days later I’m back on Chrome. I guess I’m just addicted to the raw performance.

Get it, 1.5 million downloads is not a fluke.

Shareaholic

Don’t worry Apple fanboys. This only means Jobs and company will make Safari’s new Extensions Library perfect when the time is right. Perhaps they will also implement hardware acceleration to Safari 5.1…? o_O

Do you feel comfortable with Google’s new unleashed evil?

gizmodo.com

I love the minimalistic interface, it’s something Microsoft does well, Mozilla does so so and Apple does great. Google however perfected it. I do have a problem with “Home” button being an option to check in order to appear on the toolbar. I thought that was kind of stupid, there was no other way to access Home unless you opened a new tab. Since your bookmarks are accessed via Home I kind of needed it to be easily accessible. Turning it on solved my problems.

Edit: Bookmark bar can be enabled as well, and it looks pretty sweet. No RSS live update though, but that’s not a big problem and can be added.

It doesn’t have the best extensions either. Actually there are none at the moment. That is expected, as the browser is still in beta stage. Hopefully developers catch on soon. There is a big problem though, it uses Apple WebKit. All of your favorite Firefox extensions will need to be recompiled with slight changes to work on Chrome. I wish they had kept the architecture the same.

My favorite thing about Chrome is its separate processes for each tab you open. Albeit it is also a problem as people reports larger than normal memory footprint is needed for all the tabs. As the software is still in beta stage, I’m sure it will be patched in time.

PS: You don’t have to enable the whole big brother stats sending feature in Chrome. So all of that Google stealing my data paranoia can be discarded. They track what you do in all of the Google Apps as well as the standard search engine anyways. Nobody’s lost their credit card numbers due to Google yet, so I don’t expect it to ever happen. Just turn it off if you really cared about this.

All in all, a very good browser. Rendering is perfect and even faster than Mozilla’s Gecko. If and when extensions (*ahem* Adblock *ahem*) become available, I may just switch to it full time.

google.com