Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

Firefox Vs others

16 views
Skip to first unread message

Danishka Navin

unread,
Apr 26, 2011, 3:37:22 AM4/26/11
to Firefox Marketing
What are the specialities in Firefox with compared to other browsers,
specially Chrome ?

in terms of features, security, UI, etc


--
Danishka Navin
http://danishkanavin.blogspot.com
http://twitter.com/danishkanavin
http://identi.ca/danishka

Patrick Finch

unread,
Apr 26, 2011, 4:07:04 AM4/26/11
to Danishka Navin, Firefox Marketing

Short question, long answer :)

These are my (brief) opinions on how Firefox 4 stacks up.

I'd say that performance characteristics and security characteristics of
Firefox and Chrome seem quite similar now (harder to speak to IE on
security as you tend only to see problems retrospectively and their
"research" on the topic is funded my Microsoft and does not appear
credible IMO). Firefox and Chrome use a lot of the same back-end on
security, but Firefox clearly offers users better features in terms of
privacy (and a vision with do-not-track around the topic which Google
probably does not share, a vision which is already being implemented
across the industry). Chrome and IE also have their own privacy
approaches which are either complex and unlikely to get much user uptake
(in the case of Chrome) or potentially misleading and likely to get
gamed (in the case of IE, which has also since implemented Firefox's
do-not-track header).

On performance, Firefox and Chrome are both now very, very fast. This
is an important consideration for a browser, but not one where Firefox
or any other browser stands out at the moment.

Other features: the user interface in Firefox 4 is "minimalist" like
IE9, Chrome etc, but what's important to me is that we haven't just
chopped menus off and hidden them (which seems like a fair description
of what happened in IE9). Rather, the UI is still very intuitive and
contains features such as switch-to-tab, pinned tabs (which does have an
equivalent in Chrome and IE) and tab groups that help the user manage
their workflow. One obvious gap that's often cited is the lack of a
"new tab" page in Firefox: but the blank screen is intentional as the
browser gets of the way of the user and doesn't distract them in their
workflow.

Fx 4's interface is in fact still very customisable (Alex Limi's blog on
Fx 4 UI is a great reference http://limi.net/articles/firefox-4/ ) in a
way that IE and Chrome simply are not.

Firefox still owns customisation broadly - although Chrome may offer a
higher number of add-ons, it's worth bearing in mind
a. there is little curation of the Chrome add-on store, some of the
addons I've used are very disappointing
b. Chrome add-ons are similar to Jet-Pack add-ons in terms of
functionality supported. We offer much richer, deeper customisation.
c. Firefox has a much stronger tradition of user-generated
customisation, including the Personas gallery.
...but, with Fx4, we've got a new add-on manager which makes
customisation of Firefox also much easier and restartless addons.

Lastly, Sync is both more secure and more useful that equivalents in
Chrome or IE: it's fully encrypted on the client side and allows you to
open tabs up across instances of Firefox. If you use more than one
instance of Firefox, this is incredibly useful!

Now, I'll let a more qualified person talk about platform support...

(Curious to see what else people would call out here.)

Patrick


On 26/04/2011 09:37, Danishka Navin wrote:
> What are the specialities in Firefox with compared to other browsers,
> specially Chrome ?
>
> in terms of features, security, UI, etc
>
>

--
Patrick Finch
Mozilla
pat...@mozilla.com
Mobile: +46 768 444 833
Office: +1 650 903 0800 ext. 340
Twitter: @patrickf
IM: patric...@gmail.com

pa...@appcoast.com

unread,
Apr 26, 2011, 11:11:54 AM4/26/11
to Patrick Finch, Firefox Marketing, Danishka Navin
Thanks for sharing Patrick i found that very informative.

Best, Paul

0 new messages