Hmm, for me, chrome is a much bigger memory hog than FF. Its memory usage is somewhat more controllable because of the process-tab thing (which is probably also responsible for its greater memory usage), but while actually in use, it uses a lot more memory for a given set of tabs open.
Speedwise, they seem pretty much neck-and-neck, although chrome is faster at some of the advanced webgl 3d rendering stuff...
[The competition with chrome has been a great thing, as it seems to have lit a fire under the FF devs, and resulted in many, many, improvements in recent versions.]
As an end user, i can say that :
a) Chrome memory usage is far less than Firefox. try 50+ tab and you'll see.
b) Chrome is faster than firefox but it's buggy when you have many tabs
c) Mozilla never try to take my personnal data
Depends on the number of tabs one tends to have open. On Ubuntu your (a) and (b) are far worse for me in Chrome than in Firefox (in fact that much worse that I only use Chrome on my 8GB RAM laptop but not on a 4GB one). I agree with (c).
You're assuming the way Firefox renders if the "correct" implementation. This is like old IE developers complaining about their site "breaking" on Firefox.
Yes, Firefox is the new IE, literally. In the past years generally everything just works, i develop in Safari and then test in IE, Opera and Chrome. Usually no big quirks. And then comes Firefox, usually something is badly broken. Let's say i have added extra tags into DOM just for FF only, I have FF specific CSS hacks.
The first thing you learn as a web developer with respect to (modern - ignoring IE 7 and even 8) cross browser compatibility is that all browsers have their quirks and all of them suck. Off the top of my head:
Until recently, Chrome 'implemented' the HTML5 date input by giving the user a spinner on the side of the input box which, when pressed, will set the date in the input to '00-00-0000'. Worse, this renders the normal feature detection used by libraries such as modernizr.js useless.
There was a bug that caused inset box shadow used to be rendered outside the element. This is fixed in recent desktop versions, but still haunts older versions of Android's default browser - versions as recent as the one included with 3.x Honeycomb are affected.
Browsers, even modern ones, are incredibly quirky. Moving to a monolithic Webkit market will not help with any of the bugs listed above, nor, I suspect, most of the bugs one might encounter today as a web developer.
The first thing? Well, I have been web developer since 1999. I wrote drag&drop cross-browser JS in 2003. Under my belt is front-end of one Seedcamp winner, webapp that was presumed as native on iOS. What exactly do you wan't to teach me?
Is this a widely held view?
From an end user perspective Chrome and Firefox feel pretty much neck and nack. Firefox has better memory usage, Chrome JS engine is a little faster.
I use both (Chrome on Ubuntu and Firefox on Android).