Chrome fails again – back to Firefox

Every now and then I buy into the hype about how “fast” Chrome is and how much better it is than Firefox and how Firefox’s only advantage is its many extensions. Then I actually try to use Chrome as my main browser and realize how badly implemented it is for my purposes. More details on that from last year’s post The extension that makes Google Chrome bearable, but I left off that list this bit of annoyance: Are you sure you want to open 31 tabs?

I’ve done some Google searching on this, and there appears to be no way to turn off this warning. I have daily bookmarks I open… every day. And they’re stored in one folder I right-click to open all at once. I don’t really need Nanny Chrome asking me every time if I’m sure I want to open all those bookmarks. Thank you, Firefox, for remaining an amazing browser that does everything I need it to.

18 comments

  1. Everybody always says it’s so fast but to my own surprise Chrome or Chromium turned out to be VERY VERY VERY slow on my two PCs compared to Firefox. As well as on Linux as on Windows. No clue why. Also, the Windows 7 on my sister’s modern laptop frequently hung due to Chrome.

  2. Chromium is much faster than Firefox that is for sure. I’ve been running the Firefox 4 Beta 13 (and yes I’m aware the RC came out) I believe for quite a while. I had tons of tabs open and I would really hate closing Firefox because the layout engine seemed to take much longer (especially in the Firefox 4 Betas and in fact for some reason it would often times get stuck and stop “layouting” so I would need to close firefox and of course re-open and wait for all the those tabs to reload I hope this has been fixed in the RC, though I’ve tried the Betas and RC on Windows and Chrome is still faster and page layout.

    Anyway, I’ve been using Chrome/Chromium for a while and it renders pages faster, but is severely lacking/minmalist which if it wasnt for fast page rendering and start-up would make me not really enjoy it as much as I enjoy firefox.

    Though, when Firefox 4 Final gets release I will still upgrade. Though, they’ve already pissed me off with the change to the “Restore Sessions” at least from what I can tell in Windows. Instead of allowing me to checkbox what I want to restore they have a single tab. LAAAAAMEEEE

  3. NFBlaze, I don’t question your experience, but my experience regarding speed is just very different and I wonder why.
    Perhaps I have better or worse graphic cards on my PCs or use different compositing settings.
    I mostly use Firefox 3.6 though 4beta was also faster than Chrome/Chromium.

    P.S. Chrome is slightly worse with AdBlock anyway. I got more ads than with Firefox.

  4. I can’t stand Chrome. It is just my own preference, but when I use Chrome I feel like all my options have been taken away. Imagine owning a Lincoln with all the options, driving it for 5 years, then trading it in for a stock Honda Civic. You will miss all the options you used to have. Sure you could supercharge the civic and make it fast as heck, but it is still a bare bones car.

    That is how I feel about Chrome. It is fast but lacks everything I want from a browser. Firefox has been my main browser ever since version 1.5 back in 2004 I think. I don’t see myself changing browsers any time soon. :)

    Advice to Google… offer a more feature rich version to capture some firefox users. A Chrome-Lite version with the current setup will keep current users happy.

  5. I have been using Chrome and more recently the free software Chromium, since December 2009 when it first became available for Linux. I really like it as a browser as it has proven to be everything that Firefox 3 wasn’t: simple, much faster and easier to use. I started with Chrome 4.0.249.30 and have run every stable version up until the current Chromium 10.0.648.127 and its replacement 10.0.648.133. The reason for the quick update of the stable version in the Ubuntu repositiries there is that .127 had a serious bug as explained at http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/03/stable-and-beta-channel-updates.html The problem is that .133 still has the bug. The bug report is not publically available, so I assume it is “classified”. That means I can’t even let them know it isn’t fixed! These last two versions of Chromium and presumably Chrome can’t edit long form pages, they just lock up and crash the tab and sometimes the whole browser. That is not going to bother most users, but working on long Wikipedia articles is a non-starter. As a consequence I have been once again trying out Epiphany and have written it up at the link in the header here.

  6. I’ve been using chromium and sometimes chrome for a long time and have never, ever seen this message. I almost always have at least 15 tabs and up to 60. Comes with running an OS that stays up I guess. I sometimes use the too many tabs extension that hides some of the tabs but still have 15+ open.

    I don’t know how you can turn off your message because I don’t know how it even comes up.

  7. It comes up if you have a folder of bookmarks and then try to open them all up in tabs. Put your 60 tabs into one bookmarks folder and then open them all up at once. Then you’ll get the message.

    As I said in the blog post, I have a bunch of sites I like to visit every day, so I open them all up at once in tabs. I don’t want to have to confirm every time I want to do that. In Firefox you have the ability to turn off the warning. In Chrome, you don’t.

  8. I recommend you try opera. Its linux version has been massively improved in recent releases.

  9. have you tried the Opera browser? it is as customisable as a browser could be and very highly functional. i can recommend it to anyone. give it a go.

  10. I’ve tried Opera numerous times and even its latest version, and it fails on many fronts for me (great for others, just not me). These are just the ones I can think of immediately:

    1. The “smart” bar (just as in Chrome) isn’t smart enough. If I visit a site more than once and start typing any part of that site, it should pop up to the top of the autocomplete, as it does in Firefox. The more frequently I visit the site, the higher up I want it to appear when I start typing, just as it does in Firefox.

    2. No matter what setting I use, tab closing behavior doesn’t work the way I want it to. I want, when I close a tab, for the focus to be always on the tab to the right of the closed tab, unless it’s the right-most tab.

    3. I don’t want a speed dial screen ever.

    4. When I control-tab, I just want it go to the next tab. I don’t want a little dialogue pop-up showing me which open tab I’m focused on.

    Maybe the way Opera is works well for Brandon and bobbert and many others. I just prefer the way Firefox works.

  11. interesting you mention the address bar in FF being better than Chrome. I personally like Chrome’s better because the auto complete actually auto completes, and I can just stop typing and press enter for the site I need. For instance, I just type “F” and it auto populates Facebook,*in* the address bar, then all I need to do is hit Enter. i.e F -> Enter. FF auto-completes, but keeps the options below the address bar, which requires me to arrow down, or use the mouse to select the site.

  12. Hey, nice tutorials, I wound up here after googling for a way to install KDE on ubuntu because I really hate the new Unity. I haven’t used KDE since 3.5 so I’d like to see whats new.

    Any hoo, kubuntu-desktop package is in the software center, you just have to click ‘show technical items’ at the bottom. It doesn’t display by default.

  13. re: trying opera:
    Those settings are changeable in the vast settings dialogue of Opera (and i have changed many of them). however, a browser is a very personal thing, if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you. however, i find speed dial very simple and effective to use, you can load up all you favourite websites quickly and effectively. also, typing http://www.psy and opera filling the rest in is very useful to me, far better than having to press down past all the google filled sites to what i want then pressing enter is annoying. the tab scroller thing is weird and irksome, you can disable it (for those that are irked by it) by going menu>settings>advanced>tabs change the radio box “when closing a tab” to “in tab bar order” and unticking “show thumbnails in tab cycle” also change the value of “when closing a tab” to “activate the next tab”. it will also load all you tabs from your previous session automatically.

    all i’m saying is a few minutes playing is all you need to make opera do what you want and act the way you want, there are a million settings. but also, as mentioned, a browser is your own. :)

  14. I don’t know why people don’t believe me. I’ve played with every setting in Opera I can find. It does not behave the way I want a browser to behave. I appreciate it’s a great browser and that other people love it. It simply does not do what I want, and Firefox does.

  15. Well, some of the things you complained about are fixable, that’s all. You don’t need to have a speed dial, you don’t need to have the tab scroller dealie, you can change which tab focuses after closing another tab. (The smart bar, of course, isn’t changeable.)

    But yes, you should just use the browser you like. I just use Opera at home even though I can duplicate most of its functionality in Firefox (and even though I keep FF installed for Firebug because Opera’s equivalent isn’t good enough.) I don’t use Chrome even though I prefer a lot of things about it because Google refuse to make it possible (even with an extension) to manage tabs the way I prefer (multiple rows.) A browser that CAN do what you want (but requires you to wrestle with it to get there) isn’t as valuable as one that just works, or that you can quickly and easily configure the way you want without any difficulty.

Leave a Reply to ubuntucat Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *