Day One Of Firefox – Nostalgia

I posted about how I’m now using Firefox thanks to a friend at Mozilla. We agreed that I would use only Firefox for one week and he would use only Chrome for one week.

Well, I installed Firefox today and I really do remember why I loved it years ago. Nostalgia is in full effect.

A few highlights:

1. Firefox has improved performance significantly since I last tried it. The difference is noticeable for some page loads.
2. I have most of my extensions, like LastPass and HTTPS-Everywhere and a cool twitter extension.
3. I have extensions I couldn’t get on Chrome like NoScript and Convergence.
4. The default UI is easy to get used to.

My current issues:

1. Even though page performance is much better, for whatever reason when I log into LastPass it’s much slower and Firefox halts. I think this is an issue with the single-process architecture. On Chrome the extension itself will freeze but I can still browser without issue – on Firefox the whole process gets brought down. I use about 35,000 rounds of hashing. On Chrome this is about 3-4 seconds and on Firefox it’s more like 10 and the browser is unusable until it’s done – big issue. Chrome in general is noticeably faster – sometimes it’s more obvious than other times but it is, at least for me (and I’m sure on various hardware it’s more/ less noticeable) there can be a big difference.
2. Incognito browsing/ private browsing can’t compete with Chrome’s implementation. The biggest issue for me is that I can’t do both at the same time (though there’s an extension for this I believe), which is something I do constantly with Chrome, keeping the windows side by side. The other issue is that extensions run in incognito when I don’t need/ want them to.
3. Tab behavior by default is a pain. I like shrinking tabs, not a bar that I have to scroll through. This isn’t that big of a deal, just a little peeve that helped get me using Chrome.

I’m enjoying getting to use Firefox as it’s been a while and I’ve forgotten so much. I’m sure as time goes on I’ll have more good things to report and more to complain about.