Chrome or Firefox ?

Some have vowed to stick with Firefox, some have moved to Chrome, and some in my office are using both browser – one for work and another for personal. When I asked around, some common comments are:

• My Firefox is very personalized, with all the buttons, plugins, add-ons, themes, etc… Moving to Chrome would be like moving house to me.  It’s too much to start a new.
• Chrome is for the future! Just look at new YouTube for example, many more will move you to Chrome, unless Firefox is picking up very fast.
• Firefox is more mature.. or, isn’t it?
• Doesn’t matter… as long as not IE

While thinking whether to leave my beloved Firefox that already knows me inside out – to start a new relationship with Chrome, the young, good-looking and promising beaut.. – few things I found that I think will make geeks excited if they know. Below is the testing result of Preston Gralla from Computerworld, mainly focused on Firefox 3.6, but some results catch my eyes on comparison with Chrome.

Here’s the most important thing you need to know about Firefox 3.6: it’s faster than 3.5 by 12%. It was nearly three times as fast as Opera and nearly four times as fast as Internet Explorer. But it still lagged behind Chrome by approximately 40%.

When it comes to speed, Firefox appears to be better than Chrome when it comes to memory footprint when multiple tabs are open. With five identical tabs open in each browser, Chrome used 194.6MB versus 100.3MB in Firefox. That is partly by design, though, because Chrome uses separate processes for each tab, which leads to a larger memory footprint when multiple tabs are open.

The upside of this for Chrome (and for Internet Explorer 8, which uses the same technique), is that when an individual tab crashes, only that tab is brought down, and the browser itself remains running. With Firefox, when one tab crashes, it generally brings down the browser.

Firefox has always been bedeviled by poor memory management, particularly memory leaks. When launched Firefox 3.6 on my Vista machine with a single tab open to Google, it used 57MB of RAM. I opened five more tabs to different Web pages, and memory use grew to approximately 145MB. After I closed down those additional five tabs, and stayed on my initial Google page, it was still using 81MB of RAM — nearly a 50% increase in RAM use over when it launched.

In the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 browser test for compatibility with Web standards, Firefox 3.6 scores 94 out of 100, up slightly from the 93 scored by Firefox 3.5. Both Chrome and Opera scored a perfect 100. Internet Explorer scores a lowly 20.

The interesting line that might summarize it all:

Those who favor raw speed alone will still prefer Chrome, but Firefox is clearly superior to Chome when it comes to full-featured Web browsing.

… and I guess, I will keep both as alternatives for now. My personal browsing pattern for example, seems to require full-featured Web browsing for now and still much longer. How about you? Care to share any experience or insight that might be interesting to keep in mind? The comment box below is for you.