Chrome vs. Firefox: where Firefox beats the Google browser

[Reefa]

If you look at desktop computers, you will notice that there are three core Internet browsers left for those systems. There are also forks of two of those browsers available that increase the number of programs that you can download and use, but in the end, it all comes down to those three browsers.

There is Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chromium. If you compare Firefox and Google Chrome -- the most popular Chromium-based browser, with each other, you will notice many similarities, but also differences.

You may have heard that Chrome is a lot faster than Firefox or more secure, and while there is some truth to that, I'd like to list areas in which Firefox is superior to Google Chrome.

Firefox is not superior in all areas, and I may publish a second part eventually that highlights where Chrome beats Firefox, if that is desired by the community.Also, feel free to add anything on your mind to the comments.

1.Customization

This one is the most obvious area. You can move most interface elements around in Firefox, and even though Mozilla has limited some customization options in recent versions, you can get back those if you install extensions.

If you are using Google Chrome, you cannot modify the browser interface at all. With modify, I mean move elements from one location to another, or add elements to the browser that are not there by default.

While you can display a bookmarks bar in Chrome, that is about it in terms of customizations.

In Firefox, you can not only move most buttons and menus around or add sidebar menus that you can customize further, you can also install extensions that add even more icons and options to Firefox.

Some examples? Extension that modify the font size of the interface, the width of tabs in the browser, or add favicons back to the address bar of the browser.

2.Themes

Themes too are better in Firefox. In Chrome, you get different color schemes and a different background image, that is it.

In Firefox, and I'm talking about complete themes here, you get total conversions. New icon designs, additional icons, new toolbars, a different layout, or even classic themes that restore how Firefox looked a couple of years ago.

3.Memory usage

For a long time, Firefox was the browser that seemed to have an insatiable hunger for RAM. This was not only caused by the browser itself, but also by extensions that you ran in it.

While things have changed dramatically in the past two years, many users still think that Firefox is less memory efficient as Google Chrome.

We have compared the memory usage of Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera in the past and came to the conclusion that Chrome used more memory than all other browsers.

This can be attributed -- at least partially -- to how Chrome handles websites, as the browser opens them in individual processes. While that may improve stability and security, it still means that more memory is used by the browser.

4.Extensions

Extensions can do more in Firefox than they can in Chrome. While you will find many popular extensions for both browsers, Firefox extensions can for instance manipulate the browser chrome, while Chrome extensions cannot do so except for adding an icon to the address bar.

Chrome is still lacking when it comes to some extension types. There is no good download manager that comes close to DownThemAll for example, and unique extensions such as Automatic Save Folder that allows you to save to different folders based on file names or domains, or Tree Style Tab which changes how tabs are displayed in Firefox.

I'm no extension developer and could not really find a detailed comparison of what both extension APIs support and what they do not support.

Firefox is not superior in all regards though. All Chrome extensions do not require a restart of the browser upon installation for example, while only Jetpack Firefox extensions don't as well.

Plus, the Chrome Web Store is a nightmare to navigate.

5.Privacy

Google is an advertising company, as it makes the bulk of its revenue from its ads business. It is not clear how Google uses telemetry data that it gathers from Chrome. What we do know is that Mozilla has a very high standard when it comes to privacy, as outlined on the company website.

Firefox is also purely open source, while Google Chrome is based on the open source Chromium project plus additions that Google makes to it (that are not necessarily open source).

6.Tabbed Browsing

Both browsers support tabbed browsing, but Google Chrome does not support tabbar scrolling. This means that tabs will be reduced in size the more websites you open in the browser at the same time.

This continues up to a point where you cannot identify the sites anymore that you have opened, as they all show up as blank tabs without visual identification.

While you can -- and should -- install extensions to go around the issue, Firefox beats Chrome in terms of tab management. Not only can you set minimum and maximum width for tabs in the browser, it also supports tab groups and scrolling.

7.An optional search bar

Not everyone needs a secondary search bar in their browser, but if you want better control over your searches, or switch between different search engines regularly, you may find Firefox's implementation more useful in this regard.

First, you can assign a different search engine to the address bar and search bar, so that you can always search two different sites at once.

While you can do so with keywords in Chrome as well (by assigning them in the manage search engines menu), the same can be done in Firefox.

8.Plug-ins

This is more of a future thing than something that affects the present. Google has announced that it will get rid of all plug-ins in 2014. With that it means plug-ins like Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader or Java, or NPAPI-plugins, but not PPAPI plugins used by Chrome's native Flash Player and PDF reader plugins.

While it is usually seen as a good thing that plug-ins will become a thing of the past, it may mean that Chrome users will run into issues in 2014 as they cannot use plug-ins such as Java anymore in the browser.

You can read more about the NPAPI deprecation here.

Closing words

It all comes down to your needs, and what you use the browser for. Not all or not one of the points listed above may be interesting to you. If you do not want to customize your browser, then it is obviously not a negative that you cannot do so.

And if you have all the plug-ins you want in Chrome, then you couldn't care less about plug-ins that Firefox offers but Chrome does not.

Source:http://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/01/areas-firefox-beats-chrome-fair-square/

[mazigh]

Memory usage test is outdated! :/

[calguyhunk]

The biggest reasons for me to choose Firefox over Chrome -

1. Extensions - The ability to completely customize my browser the way I want is priceless. :thumbsup:

2. Privacy - With the entire code being open source, the chances of having any spyware collecting usage data without my knowledge/consent is minimal to none. :yes: and

3. Automatic Update Checks - The automatic updates were killing me the last time I used Chrome (experimentally) 3-4 years back. It also didn't allow you to change the default installation directory! WTF Google! :o

Don't know if that's still the case, but the inability to control what installs on my PC and where, was a big factor in me getting rid of it for good. :angry:

With the impending Australis thing, maybe I'll stay with the current version for the time being before addons like Classic Theme restorer etc. get more mature and iron out their initial glitches. And then I'll either update or switch over to Palemoon for good. :think:

4. "Preemptive rendering" - The following is the reason why Chrome is considered "faster" than Firefox.

When a website is confident about predicting what link you might click next, the site can tell Google Chrome to pre-load, or "prerender," the links, so the page loads instantly when you click it. For example, when you’re browsing a blog, you might click “next post” when you’re done reading. The blog can tell Google Chrome to pre-load the “next post,” so the page shows instantly when you click it.
When you're typing a web address in the omnibox, if Chrome has high confidence with which site you're likely to visit based on your local history, Chrome will begin to prerender that page. This will make the page show up faster when you hit enter. Link

Now this constant loading of often redundant pages in the background whether or not you want to them to load, maybe (or may not be) OK for people with unlimited, superfast internet, but a huge problem for those of us on limited bandwidth. :mad2:

So yeah, no. Not going that way again any time soon. Australis or otherwise. Sticking to Fx or it's derivatives for the foreseeable future at least. :dunno:

Edited January 3, 2014 by calguyhunk

[MidnightDistortions]

One thing that firefox is faster than chrome is when you are reloading a session it doesn't try to load every page at once, just the one your on.. at least that's what i notice when i'm on firefox.

[#return 1337]

Faggotfox is notorious for memory leaks and instability, so they thought they could try to counter that with this? Oh, it uses "100MB" less than Chrome.

OK, that just proves you finally learned how to turn on garbage collection. *clap* *clap*

[Yorel]

I left Firefox (and started with Chrome) because it used a lot of memory. I'm very surprised nowadays Firefox wins the battle in this...

[jackieo]

its about YOUR PRIVACY FROM THE NSA - GOOGLE IS EPIC FAILURE.

WINNER - FIREFOX

[SPECTRUM]

winner is Firefox.

privacy, and memory usage.

[kn_andre]

In Technological Advancement even the Tiniest Improvements Means a Whole Lot to the Producers!!! It's nice to see things looking up for Firefox .. Thanks @F3dupsk1Nup for sharing ... Cheers

[Ashish]

For me the single biggest factor where FF beats chrome black and blue is the font rendering.

Chrome has the worst font display across browsers, even IE 11 renders the font 1000 times better than chrome.

Just try to read any webpage article in all the 3 browsers, the result will be startling

[demoneye]

there is no winner or looser here , its all about what u want to get out of your browser.... for ONLY speed while flipping pages chrome is the winner for all (and some) other stuff we may consider using firefox... :)

Edited January 2, 2014 by demoneye

[insanedown58]

Reasons why I can't stay with FF:

1 - All tabs have the "old" version loaded except for the one I'm currently on.

2 - It freezes at first cold boot.

3 - It takes a couple seconds longer to load on Windows (it loads instantly in Linux)

[baso]

long live Firefox :wub: ....chrome sucks in many things

[CODYQX4]

.

Edited April 28, 2019 by CODYQX4

[jackieo]

I load FF with zero pages open - it opens to a blank page. no homepage anymore, ( and no referral cookies either!)

I just use the bookmarks bar across the top. I'm not fond of FF's boookmark folder. THAT could be done better IMHO

[tezza]

Chrome 34, Firefox 29, Internet Explorer 11: Memory Use 2014

I bench marked the memory use of popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Opera back in 2012, and a lot happened since then.

Back then, the Opera browser came first followed by Mozilla Firefox, then Internet Explorer and finally Google Chrome.

All browsers made big progress since then. Firefox jumped by 13 versions, Chrome by 12, Internet Explorer by 2, and Opera switched to Chromium.

Back then, I only looked at the memory use when ten websites were loaded in each browser. This time, I will look at three different scenarios with 5, 15 and 40 open tabs in each browser respectively.

This should cover more real-world scenarios.

Benchmark parameters

• Test system: Windows 8.1 Professional 64-bit, 8 Gigabytes of RAM.
• Browsers: Mozilla Firefox 29 Nightly, Google Chrome Dev 34, Internet Explorer 11
• All browsers without browser extensions, and plug-ins disabled.
• The 5 websites: ghacks.net, google.com, bing.com, leo.org, lifehacker.com
• The 15 websites: softpedia.com, microsoft.com, reddit.com, news.ycombinator.com, youtube.com, amazon.com, petmoz.com, donationcoder.com, wordpress.com, ebay.com, and the top 5 websites.
• The top 40 websites: yandex.ru, paypal.com, apple.com, imdb.com, bbc.co.uk, stackoverflow.com, imgur.com, alibaba.com, netflix.com, cnn.com godaddy.com, dailymotion.com, dailymail.co.uk, weather.com, wikipedia.com, deviantart.com, huffingtonpost.com, avg.com, mediafire.com, yelp.com, wikihow.com, foxnews.com, theguardian.com, forbes.com, sourceforge.com, plus the top 15 and top 5 websites.

Results

I made the decision to start with 5 pages, measure the memory use, open another 10, measure again, then the remaining 25 for the last measure.

After that, I decided to close the 25 pages to go down to 15 again, measure that, then close another 10 pages so that I would end up with the top 5, and measure again.

All measurements are taken from Chrome's about:memory page. Note that this, at least in theory, will make Chrome use extra memory as it needs to be displayed by the browser (about 24,000 k it seems)

Five open tabs

• Google Chrome 34: 258,589 k
• Firefox 29: 225,552 k
• Internet Explorer 11: 221989 k

Fifteen open tabs

• Internet Explorer 11: 550869 k
• Google Chrome 34: 448,015 k
• Firefox 29: 327,060 k

Forty open tabs

• Internet Explorer 11: 1547254 k
• Google Chrome 34: 1,167,298 k
• Firefox 29: 779,100 k

Down to 15 tabs

• Internet Explorer 11: 595373 k
• Google Chrome 34: 514872 k
• Firefox 29: 442654 k

Down to 5 tabs

• Internet Explorer 11: 377683 k
• Firefox 29: 358404 k
• Google Chrome 34: 275722 k

Key findings

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 performed worst in four of the five benchmarks. It performed best initially with only 5 tabs open in each browser, but landed last in all four consecutive benchmarks.

Google Chrome too made first place only once after nearly all tabs were closed again in all browsers. It seems to release memory faster or more efficiently than Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Firefox takes the crown as a heavy duty browser. It performed best with 15, 40 and down to 15 open tabs and never went above the 1 Gigabyte mark, while the two other browsers did.

In fact, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 11 used about twice as much memory as Firefox with 40 tabs open.

It is interesting to note that Microsoft's web browser recovered memory some time after it went down to only 5 open tabs. A few minutes later, its use dropped down to about 260,000 k of memory usage, while Firefox's usage dropped only by about 40,000 k to 318,816.

Closing Words

Depending on how you use your Internet browser, you may fare well in regards to memory use with each of them. If you have lots of tabs open at all times, then you will benefit from using Firefox the most, as the browser is the most memory efficient when it comes to opening a lot of tabs.

If you open and close tabs regularly, you may want to consider using Google Chrome or even Internet Explorer instead, as they appear to recover memory more quickly than Firefox.

Memory use should not play a big role if you are using a computer with plenty of RAM installed. If you have 4 or more Gigabytes of RAM, then it should not usually be a problem if the browser jumps to 1 or even 1.5 Gigabytes of RAM usage.

If you have less than that though, you may benefit from using a memory efficient browser such as Firefox, instead of Chrome or Internet Explorer.

http://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/02/chrome-34-firefox-29-internet-explorer-11-memory-use-2014/

[demoneye]

anyhow IE11 id a fooking joke :D

Edited January 2, 2014 by demoneye

[BBs]

Seriously is it only me who waits and waits after starting firefox? When you press the Chrome button, you see Chrome starting at the same time.

Firefox needs like 2.5-4 secs which is really too much for me :P I can't live with that!

[Alhaitham]

Seriously is it only me who waits and waits after starting firefox? When you press the Chrome button, you see Chrome starting at the same time.

Firefox needs like 2.5-4 secs which is really too much for me :P I can't live with that!

this made it better for me

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/12/firefox-starting-slow-try-disabling-hardware-acceleration/

[BBs]

this made it better for me

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/12/firefox-starting-slow-try-disabling-hardware-acceleration/

Nope, doesn't change anything, still about 2-4 seconds to start, i guess a i7 3770k @4.3GHz and Samsung 840 SSD should be able to get good results, so i guess i am not the only one with problem but i am the only one who has a problem with it :)

[NightWalker]

Firefox scroll speed sucks compared to other browsers, it is simple not smooth enough for me.

Firefox is good anyway, it is such a shame that Mozilla wants a Chrome clone ...

Edited January 2, 2014 by NightWalker

[Blackchildcx]

never let chrome sneak into my life...Cyberfox is the perf. solution for my *64 OS...Smart people are boycotting google and the chrome code.. B)

[mazigh]

Firefox may beat chrome in some points but still can't in the 2 most important for me.. which are Speed and Security (Not privacy)

[mosaji]

Firefox is my browser...always

[212eta]

Firefox is my browser...always

+1