Comment by trezor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trezor | Hacker News Reader

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The author seems to imply we will all switch to Chrome because of speed, and speed alone. You know what? My PC is faster than it ever was, CPU never hits 100% and Firefox runs fast enough for my needs. With my new i7 system I expect this to be truer than ever before.

I switched from Opera to Firefox, despite Firefox being noticeably slower, because of extensions. I love extensions. In fact, right now I'm unable to imagine a web without extensions. It would be like using a OS without the ability to write scripts or code to interact with it. I realize this probably doesn't apply to all Firefox-users, but I seriously suspect it applies to almost all early adopters.

Why would I switch to to Chrome with extensions lacking, when it offers me nothing more than Opera? In fact Opera offers more than Chrome, is just as fast (based on actual machine-to-human metrics, not artificial millisecond wanking) but that didn't stop me from going to another browser.

Speed is only one factor in the equation, and on modern machines it is highly irrelevant. If speed was that important to everyone, why didn't Opera turn out to be the top dog years ago?

What extensions do you use, that are so important to you, if I may ask? Of these, are there any that would not also function as either desktop widgets or filters applied by a proxy server to the incoming/outgoing content? I moved from Firefox on a PC to Safari on a Mac, and I'm missing it much less than I thought I would; I never really used anything other than Adblock. How is thine ride pimped?

My list of essential extensions are as follows:

* Adblock plus (with Filterset.G) * Firebug * Gamil notifier * Greasemonkey * Platypus (reformat and edit webpages live, script it, ready for Greasemonkey) * Rikaichan (Japanese dictionary with lookup directly in your browser with a simple mouse-hover) * Linkification (Create links out of any non-linked address on pages) * Mouse Gestures (Not just navigation, things like image-zooming and whatever you feel like) * Ubiquity (which pretty much has "extensions" on its own) * User agent switcher (Because some sites gives you different content than google)

Some of these things can surely be implemented in Chrome or will be implemented sooner or later. Some can probably be implemented outside the browser, but that means another layer of indirection while working with your data. In other words: A step back.

I don't expect all of these extensions ever to be ported to the core of any browser. In fact that would make very little sense as only a fringe share of the market would need it or want it.

However having the ability to have extensions and go crazy with your customized install is what makes Firefox great. And this is where Chrome fails. It wont let you make your browser yours.

It seems that nearly every post about Chrome results in a multitude of comments like this one, about how extensions are key and Chrome is useless without them. Google realizes this and is working on bringing extensions to Chrome. Mozilla, on the other hand, isn't working on bringing process-per-tab to Firefox at all. It almost seems like willful ignorance.

Firefox may be dead simply due to Mozilla not having any long term strategy vision about how to stay relevant. The issue isn't that Chrome doesn't have extensions now, but what is Mozilla doing now to plan for the future when they no longer have the extension advantage. So far it looks like nothing.

Even Firefox's vaunted new JS engine in 3.5 isn't going to be turned on for extensions, only web content. Meanwhile not only does Chrome's extension code get the V8 love, they also run as a separate process, which means they won't impact performance of browsing as much as Firefox's extension framework does.

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