Mozilla Sees You Using Chrome Alongside Firefox

If you're like me, you're using more than one open source browser these days. As I've discussed before, I love Mozilla Firefox for its many useful extensions, but Google Chrome is just faster at most of the web tasks that I perform. That's why I was absolutely heartened to see Firefox guru Chris Blizzard, from Mozilla, endorse the concept of using those exact two browsers in a recent interview. Here's what he had to say, and why he warns that you'll continue to care about Firefox.

According to Blizzard, in a derStandard.at interview, when asked about Google Chrome:

"Actually I think a lot of people are using both now, but it's interesting to see for sure. From a web developer standpoint I still think Firefox' tools are far superior than anybody else's. Interestingly we haven't seen our user numbers change that much, even though Chrome is having big wins in this segment. The thing is all those numbers reported are actually usage numbers and not user numbers, so early adopters - who use the web heavily - influence those a lot more than others. So it looks like Chrome is used by more people than it actually is."

Indeed, I have to admit that before I adopted Chrome for regular, daily use, I was a Chrome tinkerer. I downloaded the updates, experimented with the customizations, but wasn't totally onboard with Chrome. Now I am.

I also happen to care about granular features in my browser, including favorite extensions in Firefox. According to Blizzard, that's actually very much on Mozilla's radar:

"We've also done some research and what is interesting is that a lot of people seem to choose their browser on very specific features, so for instance a lot of people who prefer to see their most recently used sites when they open their browser, they use Chrome. If they want a clean blank page, they use Firefox instead."

Blizzard also notes that the next major version of Firefox, 4.0, will be "a generation ahead" in terms of Javascript speed, but does it really matter if it's so much faster than Chrome. Every iteration of benchmark tests between the two seems to show them neck-and-neck. As Blizzard notes many people are doing, I'm going to stick with both open source browsers, which, at this point, are defining browser innovation.