I wish all browsers would inherit this, that is a very powerful thing.

I know that all that maybe sounds rather petty and maybe there's something wrong with me and it's my biases for some reason, but it just all adds up to a fuzzy notion of childishness and less than "down to business" feel. I say that as someone that used to exclusively use FF and shunned Chrome for all the various reasons mentioned by others.

Not only is it very similar but, unlike Chrome or Safari, every aspect of it is customizable so you can make it look however you want. Out of the box you can rearrange the the UI elements to match Chrome or Safari.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-tab-wi...

I tried breaking the habit for a while but I ended up opening FF all the time by muscle memory.

I'm also a fan of minimal as possible.

Nothing fits better next to a terminal window or a code editor.

The new FF UI has been out and stable for nearly two years now.

And now that I think about it, it's even things like the tab behavior where Chrome condenses tabs and FF just pushes them out of view an adds the disgusting scroll UI. Maybe that's a personal preference thing, but I would very much prefer having a dense overview rather than having what is essentially a nested scrolling.

More seriously, FF's dev tools have felt more advanced than Chrome's for a while, including the ability to edit and resend an XHR request.

Try the Firefox Developer Edition or Aurora (Alpha channel, rarely crashes but the performance is much better than current stable) together with TreeStyleTabs. Maybe that will help you out. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Vimperator. It offers more functionality/hackability than Vimium as well (not that vimium is bad - I'm a happy user of both firefox/vimperator and chrome/vimium).

I recently got a new, high-end Macbook Pro (16GB, 1TB SSD, i7 2.8Gz). I've been a long-time Chrome user, but I figured this would be a good time to try Safari: I've heard good things about it's energy usage.

I used Safari as my primary browser for about 2 weeks, and just switched back to Chrome. Safari wasn't bad, but it seems to take a LONG time to make connections to websites. And sometimes it would just hang indefinitely. At first I thought this was a machine issue, but all my other networking apps (Chrome, Postman, etc.) return immediately.

Like parent comment, I really want to like Safari...

http://bgr.com/2015/08/05/google-chrome-vs-safari-battery-li...

Chrome is still my 'dev' browser though, and having the two separate is actually quite nice.

Another nice thing about having a browser only for development is that, when you're demo'ing, there's less of a risk to show unwanted stuff (e.g. address bar suggestions). :)

I go a little further and use distinct Chrome profiles for every project to avoid this. It also helps to keep saved credentials for e.g. client-specific SaaS accounts separate without commingling them with my own 1Password vault.

*I know 1Password now supports multiple vaults, but I haven't had a chance to try that workflow yet.

>I think it's the tabs. [...] It's also the best file downloader

In what way? The only difference I can see is the download status bar, but that's available on firefox as an extension.

>the most configurable

debatable, considering firefox has a bunch of about:config options, whereas chrome has a few configurable flags.

>has the best extension ecosystem.

Can you elaborate this? My impression was that firefox's ecosystem was better because addons can do more (thanks to XUL), whereas chrome addons are limited to glorified userscripts.

Yes, I've tried to replicate Chrome's UI with Firefox extension. But it feels like I'm using extensions. Furthermore, I really don't enjoy configuring browsers because between work, school, and hobbies I use a lot of different machine. For this reason, if I'm using firefox, it's usually with the default UI... which is not my personal preference.

>> has the best extension ecosystem.

> Can you elaborate this?

Take a cursory glance at each of the two stores:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

vs

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/extensions

Aesthetically speaking, the firefox add ons page is the Tux Racer to chrome's Mario Kart.

One has the passion and enthusiasm of well respected open source volunteers behind it, and the other has a sleek high quality shine only our dear corporate overlords could deliver. This is minor, but it sets the mood the for the whole experience of add ons. (Of which, I only need uBlock Origin"). In general, it's easier to find what I'm looking for, see what's trending, and generally browse for extensions in the chrome store. EDIT: The chrome store is also much faster and more responsive.

Aside from that, Chrome seems to have more active developers because of it's better brand name. On /r/cscareerqustions, for example, you'll hear people ask about ideas for resume-boosting side projects. One of the first answers is usually "make a chrome extension". I have yet to see anyone say "make a firefox extension" or "make a cross platform browser extension".

Either way, it's all personal preference. I'm sure you prefer a different model car, style of clothing, and a favorite color than me too. It's all ok. There's no right answer here.

Doesn't Mozilla spend a lot on Firefox development? Like in the hundreds or tens of millions of dollars range? They have very nice and grand offices, lavish even interns with expense paid trips and food, so I don't really know what you're talking about.

[Edit: They spend $212M on Software Development in 2014 alone]

E.g. https://ryanseys.com/blog/summer-at-mozilla/

>Interns at Mozilla, myself included, are truly spoiled rotten. Competitive pay, free travel/housing, free snacks/drinks and catered lunches every week were really just icing on the massive cake that was my internship!

>Oh, and did I mention that Mozilla also sent me to Paris, France?! Yeah, it happened. For my final working week, myself and a handful of the Identity team met up in the Paris office and hacked on Persona, and ate… and drank… a lot!

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-mozillas-amazing-offic...

http://ngokevin.com/blog/mozilla-day-one/

What kind of open source volunteers have perks like these?

I was purposefully judging the book by it's cover, because I was talking strictly about the cover. I know FireFox is a brilliant piece of engineering and I never mentioned Mozilla. Red Hat spends a lot on Linux development too, doesn't mean anything about the aesthetics of the platform.

But maybe this is down to your tab preferences. I simply hate tabs. To me, they're the sign of a failed window manager. I don't feel it's the job of every application to reinvent the UX wheel and implement tab functions differently from every other application.

Maybe some day an operating system will support tabs natively?

that's why I haven't left chrome. I HATE some of the stuff they (google) do, but I can make this my browser and I like the overall appearance

You might like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

Having used Firefox since it was Firebird (lol), I can tell you it goes through noticeable cycles of being awesome and just plain bad. Working hard to become the fastest browser an example of the former, and the whole Pocket fiasco being an example of the latter.

ATM I use Safari as my main browser, Firefox for testing websites and some other plugins, and Chrome for the built-in Flash (I don't have Flash on my system).

Wait, what? For me, Chrome is utterly unusable for “research sessions” (aka routine browsing). It starts chewing up resources like crazy and completely falls over when I try using it for any amount of time with 25+ tabs open. Google’s non-search webapps seem to be particular offenders: more than a few tabs of them open in Chrome brings my fast laptop to its knees.

Firefox is good up to about 100 tabs, but becomes a big CPU and memory hog and inevitably crashes after a day or two.

In Safari, I routinely keep 200+ tabs open for weeks at a time with no problem (though eventually I start running out of system memory; not sure if there’s a slow memory leak, or if badly written websites just require indefinitely large amounts when kept open, or what; usually by that point there’s a new security update to install in any case).

But I have 32GB RAM. And The Great Suspender, which is a must-have for anyone who uses Chrome.

Chrome is a fine development environment though.