Firefox has been improving noticeably faster since Chrome came into the picture. Not just lately either. FF has gotten much faster, much less memory hungry, and added a lot of new features (many inspired by chrome).
I find I use both regularly, and which I use by default changes often, depending on the circumstance. E.g. they're both pretty fast these days, but on different things. FF seems more memory efficient overall, but chrome's per-tab-process thing makes it easier to manually reclaim memory by closing a tab (the per-tab-process also probably makes chrome less able to share memory between tabs, so there seems an inherent tradeoff, and explains FF's win here).
So it seems a virtuous cycle, and chrome's to be lauded not only for a great browser, but for heating up the browser race in a way that seems to have resulted in every browser improving.
I just added fauxbar[0] to chrome, which fixes the worse feature of chrome - the bad history integration when typing in the url bar. I love both, too, but this addition to chrome puts it back in the lead.
The developer toolbar mostly. I do a good amount of web dev so its helpful. Taking pdf screenshots with a single command has come in handy. Also the 3D view is gimmicky but pretty awesome. Tab groups is another favorite.
There still seems to be some sort of memory leakage though. I have to shut down the browser every so often to clear out the 3GB of ram it suddenly decided it needed to have.
Some things Chrome includes that other browsers do not: Pepper, Native Client, Chrome Web Store, WebSQL (Safari might have that one too), a native PDF viewer, SwiftShader, etc.
(People of course disagree on which of those are bad and which are good.)
It's only in the Dartium branch so far, I believe - not in trunk Chromium or release Chrome. But yes, it's another controversial feature that Google is planning to bundle.
Interesting. I can't really tell how fast Chrome starts up, because it's starts in the background when my desktop environment loads and I'm on an SSD. But that would in fact be a good indicator for bloat.
Be sure to watch in 480p, not 360p. I can make out what he's typing, though it is a bit blurry. Plus, if you only care about the commands, he always mentions them - just not all of the parameters.
Firefox's lack of HiDPI support was killing my eyes, but I've been using Nightly builds and they look great. The only problem I see is that Flash plugins get confused about screen sizes (so YouTube has tiny control buttons).
The plugin support hasn't bothered me yet, and it's almost surprising.
The amount of flash I use on a daily basis is so incredibly minimal these days. I've started using the built in plugin blocking with firefox. The only time I really turn it on is for Netflix and the occasional video that isn't part of the HTML5 beta on youtube is about it.
( not that any of this is an excuse to not fix the bug :P )
As Google Chromes GWT Developer plugin is noticeably slower (and stopped working altogether) than that of Firefox's, having to use non-retina supported browser for GWT development is annoying.
As a guy who writes software who doesn't write much html (because web is hard) I can't help but feel that having all these devtools built in by default, while nice for developers, seems silly to have wasting space on the hard drives of millions of users. They will never use the source viewers, live editing, page heuristics, etc, and it reeks of feature creep to me, and one product trying to be too many things at once.
It may be a waste of space, yes, but space is cheap.
Also, it is extremely valuable to have these tools on every browser I happen to use. I can see what's wrong with my website--or anybody's website--at any computer. If you go to some page and something doesn't work, I can just open the developer tools on your browser and try to sort it out.
So while most people don't need these tools most of the time, they can still be useful once in a while and have a negligible cost.
Some stats:
~350 million users[1]
~17Mb download[2]
Lets assume a full 25% is dev tools (I think its likely to be much less), so 4.25Mb per user. That's 1418Tb, or just under 500 3Tb disks. Considering that's spread across 350 million users, I think that's not too much at all, and its probably much less.
Which extension are your referencing. I'm currently using Page Saver but previously used Awesome Screenshot Plus until they started intercepting pages and spamming adverts to them by default. Having it in-browser is good.
Also I've not seen a screenshot tool that allowed an id to be specified before as someone said this will/does.
That's great! It's much better than the prev Firefox dev toolbar. I wonder if people will take the time to learn the Firefox specific console commands?
They aren't mutually exclusive, they complement each other. At the end of the video, using the new developer toolbar, he enables Firebug, and shows off that there are now Firebug specific commands that have been added to the toolbar.
I'm really pleased to see that Mozilla is finally stepping up to the plate and trying to bring web developers back into the fold that have been enjoying the much better Webkit dev tools. I hope they continue with this momentum.
You can remap individual applications' keyboard shortcuts in System Preferences > Keyboard settings. For this case, the keyboard shortcut should remap the menu item "Developer Toolbar". I like to remap CMD+Q to something harmless like "Hide Others" to avoid accidentally quitting apps. :)
Tried the CSS inspector in Aurora. As of today, there is still no keyboard nudge support (Click on the value of a CSS rule and then press keyboard up / down keys to adjust it +1 / -1).
Sticking with Firebug until this feature is added.
You can probably get something like chrome using "Hide Caption Titlebar Plus" (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/hide-caption-tit...) to hide the titlebar and put the windows button directly into the window. You can even use Stylish to customize those button (so they'll fit your theme).
I don't like the window decorations of most window managers. Openbox allows users to set keyboard shortcuts, customize a menu that's always a couple of keystrokes away, and the window decorations can be customized as well. It's worth tolerating, but I spend a lot of time in my browser. I've been spoiled by Chrome, and now I don't want to switch away.
That said, there are a couple of other things that keep me on Chrome such as its element inspector.
Lately they haven't stopped releasing new great things: Persona, lljs, WebPlatform (co-participation), now this developer command bar, ... sth else? Impressive.