The question was what Chrome does differently to Firefox. Firefox had adblocking before Chrome ever existed.
IMO Chrome:
- Feels faster
- Looks a bit better
Firefox, on the other hand:
- Has better extensions
- Has a better URL bar search function
I actually use Chrome nowadays. It turns out that the speed and looks of the UI are important enough that I can put up with less polished extensions and a slightly inferior URL bar.
I wish Google would make their URL bar better though. Surely it can't be that hard to match in the middle of URLs rather than just matching from the beginning? :/
Can I add to this that I really don't like Chrome's tab handling in comparison? I'll regularly have 10+ tabs per window open. Firefox? No problem, they scroll and there's a pop-down menu to let me see what they all are at a glance. Chrome does neither of these, squashing my tab bar into unreadable oblivion.
I'd also rate Firefox's bookmark and history functions as in another league compared to Chrome's rather basic offering, but neither of them are dealbreakers for me. Large tab group handling is, and Chrome just doesn't do it.
For me, it's the opposite. Chrome's search bar does what I want predictably (run a Google search) where the awesome bar sends me all sorts of crazy places. It's that feature alone that keeps me on chrome.
I guess it depends on what you want to do. The Firefox awesome bar does a better job at guessing what bookmarked or historical site you want.
For instance, if I type in "y" or "yc" in Firefox, then it correctly guesses that I probably want "news.ycombinator.com", because it's a site I often visit and one of the very few with "y" or "yc" in the domain name.
Chrome, on the other hand, seems to only match from the start of bookmarked URLs. So "y" doesn't match, and nor does "yc". Instead it advises me to do a Google search. On the other hand, if I type "n", then it does guess that I want "news.ycombinator.com" (or "news.bbc.co.uk").
In Firefox 4, the default address bar search changed to a regular Google search, rather than the "browse by name" behavior used in Firefox 3.6 which would sometimes do a search and sometimes go straight to the top result [1]. It should be much more predictable now.
When Chrome came out it was (or felt?) ridiculously faster than anything else on the market - I could open Chrome and go to a page faster than I could open another browser.
IMO Chrome:
- Feels faster
- Looks a bit better
Firefox, on the other hand:
- Has better extensions
- Has a better URL bar search function
I actually use Chrome nowadays. It turns out that the speed and looks of the UI are important enough that I can put up with less polished extensions and a slightly inferior URL bar.
I wish Google would make their URL bar better though. Surely it can't be that hard to match in the middle of URLs rather than just matching from the beginning? :/