Browsers

[RichardGv]

Firefox has been my favorite during the last 2 years. The reasons:

1. Extensibility & customizability;
   • Firefox has a vastly superior extension API than Chromium or Safari, which brings the possibility of creating much more powerful extensions than the extensions of other browsers. On AMO there are 161,138,764 available, and there are a consider amount of high-quality ones among them. I'm currently using about 30 Firefox extensions, and I guess I couldn't live without them. :)
     
   • Numerous options to tune its behavior. (Even though a lot of them are hidden deeply in about:config.) Seeming Chrome/Chromium does not offer such abilities.
     
   • XUL interface brings a incredible level of interface customization, that you can literally change any part of its interface, through CSS/JavaScript.
     
2. Security. Firefox itself probably has more security holes exposed than Chrome/Chromium, but with NoScript it's a lot more safer.
   
3. No web development tools is so far comparable with Firebug, as far as I know.
   

The bad parts of it:

1. Lack of process isolation. Well, they got plugin processes isolated in Firefox 3.6.4, but the tabs aren't isolated yet.
   
2. Speed. Well, Firefox is slower than most other modern browsers except IE for now. Start-up is slower, page loading is slower, JavaScript execution is slower. Nevertheless, as another person pointed out, the productivity enhancement brought by the extensions of Firefox is enough to cover the loss of time caused by its slow speed.
   

IE: Well, it doesn't work on Linux at all, so...
Chromium/Chrome. Well, even though it's overtaking Firefox among power users, it has not captured me yet. :)

1. Chromium/Chrome is indeed way faster in JavaScript than even Firefox 4 Beta. (Probably JagerMonkey will close this gap slightly, though.) I don't think JavaScript execution speed is predominant factor when choosing a browser, though. The era of playing a FPS on a webpage with JavaScript has not yet come. :)
   
2. Chromium/Chrome does not render widgets in webpages with my nice GTK+ theme due to internal limitations, but Firefox does.
   

Opera: Huh, it's good, but I don't use it much. Opera Turbo and Opera Unite both seems attractive. But it does not respect my fontconfig configuration somehow, so the font rendering is so sickening that I even don't want to look at it. Yeah, I love judging a software from its appearance. :)

A list my installed Firefox extensions, by the way:
Generated: Sun Sep 26 2010 11:41:23 GMT+0800 (CST)
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100917 Gentoo Firefox/3.6.9
Build ID: 20100917104141

Enabled Extensions: [30]
- Adblock Plus 1.2.2
- Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper 1.0.6
- Autofill Forms 0.9.6.1
- BetterPrivacy 1.48.3
- CacheViewer 0.6.3
- Certificate Patrol 1.4
- CoLT 2.5.0
- Console² 0.6.1
- DOM Inspector 2.0.8
- Firebug 1.5.4
- Firecookie 1.0.2
- Flagfox 4.0.9
- Form History Control 1.2.6
- Greasemonkey 0.8.20100408.6
- iMacros for Firefox 7.0.0.0
- LastPass 1.69.1
- Lazarus: Form Recovery 2.0.5
- Locationbar² 1.0.5
- Mason 0.3.7.8
- MR Tech Toolkit 6.0.4
- NoScript 2.0.3.2
- Read It Later 2.0.6
- Redirector 2.5
- Session Manager 0.6.8.3
- Stylish 1.0.11
- Tab Mix Plus 0.3.8.4
- Tamper Data 11.0.1
- Web Developer 1.1.8
- WOT 20100908
- XPather 1.4.5

Installed Themes: [1]
- Default

Installed Plugins: (2)
- Java™ Plug-in 1.6.0_21: libnpjp2.so
- Shockwave Flash: libflashplayer.so