Firefox 13 attempts to catch-up with others

The much awaited and bragged (dragged?) about Firefox 13 with brand new home page has been released - 4 days ago.  Yeah!  I have been a little slow on the uptake this week - more on those troubles later.  You could say that I am attempting to catch-up on the events.
;-)

So what is new with Mozilla Firefox 13?

If you want the short version, the Mozilla Firefox 13 has:

• fixed some 7 security bugs;
• a new Home page which offers access bookmarks, history, add-ons, sync, etc. - something which Chrome and Opera have had for long now;
• a new Tab page which greets you with frequently visited sites - just like Chrome does;
• a Reset Firefox option to fix issues with a single click in “about:support” page;
• better JavaScript performance and HTML5 support;
• faster startup and slightly better memory usage; and
• faster browsing and webpage loading - by using Google’s, yeah, Google’s SPDY (speedy) protocol.
• :-D

So should you upgrade?  Definitely!  Firefox 13 is better than any of its earlier versions and the security fixes alone should be enough reason to upgrade.

OTOH, will Firefox 13 make me switch from Google Chrome 19?  I don’t think so.  But my preference is a qualified one.  Having been tied to an old processor & RAM (a Celeron 1.7GHz on an Intel 845 GLVA MB with 1 GB of DDR1 RAM), I hate memory leaks and abhor extensions which eat up resources.  For e.g., it find it better and faster to type Chennai Weather in the browser rather than keep an extension on at all the time.  But that is me!

BTP, let me pull up a little bit of other ‘cons’ which still wouldn’t make me switch back to Firefox soon.  Mind you, these are what I find better in Chrome 19 and ‘buggy’ in Firefox 13 - you may not find these as irritants if your browsing patters are different.

• the separate address and search bars or boxes, instead of the ‘omnibox’ - once you are used to the omni/universal nature of the address bar, it is downright buggy to type something and do a double take when nothing happens with other browsers, like Firefox 13;
• the inability to zoom in/out when on a browser window.  In Chrome 19 it is easy to click ‘wrench’ and access the zoom or use ‘Ctrl +’ or ‘Ctrl -‘ to zoom and take a snapshot of a ‘full’ webpage, instead of a partial one (like the ‘about:support’ page image below).  In Firefox, about 2010 or so the zoom controls disappeared.
• update:  Though Firefox 13 doesn’t visibly display zoom controls, using Ctrl+/Ctrl- works.

• Chrome has an nice option to ‘Duplicate’ a current tab into a new one.  This is a nice option when you are searching and want to read (compare) 2 or more webpages on the same search.  Imagine, you are in a certain page and want to cross check a small info with something on a page visited earlier.  With Chrome it is very easy to duplicate current page, hit backspace to go to search results and open the earlier page.  In Firefox 13 it is a little clumsy to ‘Move to a new Window’ and switch back and forth between windows, instead of tabs.

So these are my pet cribs which would hinder me from switching over to Firefox 13 as my main browser.  It will continue to be my secondary or fall back browser, to be used when something goes wrong with Google Chrome.

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