Sunday 9 August 2015

Chrome vs. Firefox By Drishti Kajal

Chrome vs. Firefox

Back in the day, web browsers didn't mean quite as much. Now they are an integral part of our lives. While we could just go with the system default back in the day, now passionate users support their browsers as fervently as their operating systems.

Chrome Is More Polished, Firefox Is More Customizable

Firefox, though, still beats it in level of customization. It may be a little slower and clunkier, but with things like about:config you can really tweak every tiny corner to your heart's content , which is pretty killer. It may not have as many big features, but the features it does have you can configure to the tiniest detail. And if you're a person that likes things just so, that's hard to give up.
Firefox Offers Better Privacy
Google put a lot of work into making Chrome look nice and feel more polished than your average browser. As a result, you get a great experience out of the box. Firefox, on the other hand, offers a lot of control over how it looks and operates. While many people made this argument, our own Whitson Gordon summed it up most concisely:
Chrome is a much more polished browser. It's smoother, it feels faster, and it's got a lot of cool extra features like application shortcuts and packaged apps. It is, without a doubt, the browser I'd recommend to most people, and it feels like a more mature browser despite the fact that it's older.
Chrome has a lot of extensions, but some users feel Firefox has better, more capable ones. Reader missed falls into this camp:
Firefox wins on extensions, privacy and security. Chrome wins on simplicity and smoothness. However FF is working on both simplicity (australis) and smoothness (electrolysis) for next year. That said, they are more equal then many realize. FF favors the power user with many tabs and extensions. Chrome favors the average user with only a couple of tabs open and no extensions.
While others still look at Chrome very much as a browser for power users as well, Firefox (as noted earlier) offers more fine-grain control.
According to reader misdeem, Firefox wins on both user privacy and security. Let's start with the privacy argument:
FF does not make money of user data. They go to such pains to protect their users that I think seeing how both Chrome and FF are both good browsers, this issue alone should be enough to drive people into Mozilla's arms.
And now, security:
I think that out of the box Chrome is likely to be very slightly more secure then FF due to its sandboxing model (which is why Chrome is also worse in memory usage). That said, FF's security extensions are so powerful that overall I think FF is superior in this category. Adblock plus, No Script, Ghostery, pdf.js and soon Shumway will lock your browser down like Fort Knox. But for inexperienced users who don't want to customize there can be slight benefits to using Chrome.
Furthermore, Chrome has an insecure password manager and you should use a third-party option instead. Overall, it's hard to argue against these points. Google does have something to gain by collecting data about you whereas Firefox does not—on the surface, at least. With third-party extensions—which Mozilla doesn't intend to lock down to prevent installations from outside of their own site—you can do a lot more to stay secure. If either of these things matter to you greatly, you may prefer Firefox.


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By:- Drishti Kajal
Student of Amity | FireFox Student Ambassador

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