Chrome vs Firefox

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Google Chrome Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
VS
 Mozilla Firefox
http://www.google.com/chrome http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

Chrome and Firefox are open-source web browsers. Chrome is developed by Google, while Firefox is developed by Mozilla. The two browsers compete with one other on performance and usually outperform each other on each release.

Contents

[edit] Platform Support

Firefox supports a wide range of operating system platforms, such as (but not limited to):

  • Apple MacOS X
  • FreeBSD (including PC-BSD and DesktopBSD)
  • Linux-based systems
  • Microsoft Windows
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Sun Solaris

The Google-branded Chrome browser runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. It can probably be safely assumed that the Linux port will be ported to other platforms as well.

[edit] Performance

Chrome claims the fastest Javascript performance out of all publicly released web-browsers, according to benchmarks released by Google, thanks to its V8 Javascript engine. Webkit rendering performance is also good -- presumably one of the reasons Google chose it over Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine as the basis of the Chrome browser.

Firefox 3.0 is slower than Chrome 1 & 2. Firefox 3.5 runs Javascript on par with Chrome 2 due to its new JavaScript engine : SpiderMonkey. Preliminary benchmarks for Chrome 3 show it will double V8's speed, putting it back in the lead.

[edit] Memory

Chrome uses more memory than Firefox, probably due to its separate-process-per-tab implementation. Firefox, however, takes longer to release memory, even when tabs have been closed. Users that frequently open and close tabs will benefit from Chrome's instant release of memory for every closed tab.

[edit] Start Up

Chrome has a faster cold start-up time than Firefox. This might be due to the fact that Firefox has more features than Chrome. Firefox also tends to get slower when more plugins are installed because the plugin load time adds to the overall application load time.

[edit] Stability

Chrome has a stable version, a BETA version, a DEV (Developer), and a Canary build (similar to the DEV build). To improve stability, Chrome included a new technology that allows each tab in the browser to run as its own process. This provides for tab independence, as well as improved performance with multiple processors and lower memory usage for web applications. This is still one of the most unique things about Chrome as a browser.

It is still possible to make Chrome crash with two key strokes or following a link. It should even to be possible to make Chrome crash automatically when page loads through one line of ECMAScript (JavaScript). You only have to get empty schema and a trailing "special character". For example try typing ":%" (without the "qoutaiton marks") and see what happens. WARNING: Do not do this in a important browing session as Chrome will not be able to restore your tabs.

Firefox is considered stable in its current release (version 3.6), though it has not been entirely free of stability issues over its tenure as the most popular open source browser, including occasional denial of service vulnerabilities that could be used to crash the browser.

[edit] Interface

Chrome's interface revolves around individual tabs. There is no menu or toolbar that is shared across tabs. Each tab has its own set of menus and toolbars. Tabs can also be dragged and dropped to from new windows or from one window to another.

For those who are using a small screen, Chrome's may be more convenient for a number of reasons: the status bar at the bottom pops up only when it is displaying new information (such as the URL of a link under the mouse cursor. Chrome's equivalent to firefox's "file", "edit", and other menus is placed on the same line as the URL input-box. The "tab bar" is integrated into the "application name bar".

By contrast to Chrome's two "bars", firefox typically includes: 1. application title bar 2. web page "tab" bar 3. menu bar (file, edit, etc) 4. URL input bar (including back button, etc) 5. Status bar (at bottom)

One motivation for reducing the number of "bars" in the web browser is that a user's screen may be filled with several other bars, meaning that the total number of bars on the screen providing information and application buttons ("file" menu, "back button", etc) can rise to 8 or more: the five mentioned above, plus: 1. bookmarks 2. windows "start bar" or equivalent 3. menu bars related to common web applications used for text editing, etc.

Firefox's interface features a standard default. The interface is very flexible and can even be changed to look like Chrome with an extension. Some users have reported a loss of browser stability using this add-on. Tabs can also be dragged and dropped (on platforms other than Mac as of release 3.0.6).

[edit] Security

Chrome provides a number of features not common to other major browsers that may contribute to increased security, including (but not limited to):

  • a new default feature that grays out the non-host portion of the URL in the address bar, making phishing attacks easier to catch
  • process segregation of Webpages loaded in multiple tabs, providing the basis for a more complete sandboxing capability than seen in most browsers
  • a very strong privilege separation model, which Google promises will involve advanced sandboxing not only for Webpages in multiple tabs, but also for plugins and in-page scripts
  • an "incognito" browsing mode

Firefox can emulate the behavior of some of these features, including URL presentation to make phishing more obvious and a private browsing mode, through the use of extensions -- though in some cases the feature emulation is not quite complete. Firefox 3.5 has Private Browsing mode, similiar to Chrome's "incognito" browsing mode and more features.

There are some security concerns associated with Google Chrome, including speculation over whether the Google-branded Chrome browser will include unadvertised data collection to help Google more accurately target marketing. The obvious response to this is that the open source Chromium codebase will allow a verifiably "clean" install of the browser from source or through more trusted distributors, though binary distributions by Google may still be considered suspect by some.

As a more mature codebase, core functionality of Firefox has been more broadly tested in the wild, and more vulnerabilities have been discovered and secured by its open source community than for the open source Chromium codebase of Google Chrome. Firefox's password management is more developed, and probably better secured against unauthorized access, at least at this time. Custom cookie handling in Firefox is generally more advanced and can be more easily fine-tuned, despite the poor cookie policy exception searching capabilities.

Firefox's extension system has accumulated a significant number of useful security add-ons that are not yet available for Chrome, including the Perspectives distributed HTTPS certificate verification system, unwanted media blocking capabilities, automated proxy management such as for TOR, and other handy protections.

[edit] security references:

[edit] Extensions

Firefox has a very accessible extension system and an organized central extension repository managed by the Mozilla Foundation. This has contributed to the development of easily the largest extension base of all web browsers.

Chrome supports a great many extensions as well.

[edit] Popularity

Firefox takes almost 23% of the market share, but Google Chrome takes less than 3%. Firefox set a Guinness World Record in most software downloaded in 24 hours. 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 in 24 hours from all over the world. Chrome is quickly gaining adoption, however, and has more than doubled its users in 2009.

[edit] Links

[edit] Mozilla Firefox

[edit] Google Chrome

[edit] references

Marketshare survey of Web browsers @ Marketshare.Hitslink.com World Record @ SpredFirefox.com

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