With the release of Firefox 4, it solved some of the problems we had in past versions, leaving it better, at least when it comes to web development.
This article, divided into two parts, explains some of the reasons why the Firefox browser is still a better than Google Chrome for your web development work.
Evolution of the market share of browsers
About a year ago, I talked about something most of us already knew, that PHP developers are switching to Google Chrome as its web browser access.
As you can see in the table below, this trend continues to be true this year. These numbers were taken from statistics developers PHP Classes logged in to the site .
Browser | May 2009 | May 2010 | May 2011 | Change |
Mozilla Firefox | 68.0% | 63.5% | 57.3% | -6.2% |
Microsoft IE | 18.5% | 13.6% | 8.9% | -4.7% |
Google Chrome | 6.0% | 15.7% | 28.1% | +12.4% |
As you can see, Chrome almost doubled its share in a year, while Internet Explorer has lost a little more than half. Firefox also fell slightly.
The gain of Chrome is greater than the loss of the Firefox and Internet Explorer. This means that Chrome also gained share lost to other browsers.
Reasons to Firefox even better than Chrome for web development
Given the fact that the participation of Google Chrome continues to grow enough, you may wonder why on this article. The fact that Chrome will continue to become increasingly popular for web browsing does not mean that web developers are also working with him in his projects. For me, this is not the case. Often when I'm doing development work, I feel I need to switch to Firefox, for reasons which I will list below.
I wish they had in mind that this article is not a rant against Google, which gave us web developers a lot to be grateful to him, but when we speak of Chrome, there is still much to be improved.
I decided to write this article now in the hope that maybe someone at Google to read, and do something to resolve these issues, most of the time, really bother most of us, since we do not keep changing all the time browsers .
1. View HTML
Given the fact that the participation of Google Chrome continues to grow enough, you may wonder why on this article. The fact that Chrome will continue to become increasingly popular for web browsing does not mean that web developers are also working with him in his projects. For me, this is not the case. Often when I'm doing development work, I feel I need to switch to Firefox, for reasons which I will list below.
I wish they had in mind that this article is not a rant against Google, which gave us web developers a lot to be grateful to him, but when we speak of Chrome, there is still much to be improved.
I decided to write this article now in the hope that maybe someone at Google to read, and do something to resolve these issues, most of the time, really bother most of us, since we do not keep changing all the time browsers .
1. View HTML
When the code of our sites have bugs, it usually generates an HTML code that is incorrect or invalid. So we need to analyze the HTML code to understand what's wrong. Firefox has an amazing feature that allows you to select a portion of the page and it shows the exact HTML that corresponds to that portion of the selected page. This feature does not exist in Chrome.
The best you have is the Inspect Element feature, which allows you to find the HTML code for the page element below the cursor of your mouse. Not the same thing. If I select a region of the page, I want to see the full HTML of that region, not a single element.
Another annoying thing is that Chrome tries to make the HTML pretty. This means that if you have a malformed HTML, you will not see where he is malformed because Chrome will show an embellished version of the HTML code after it has been repaired. I wish they had an option to disable.
2. Validation of HTML
Another great feature of Firefox is the ability to display any validation errors of HTML that you may have. In fact, this feature is provided by the extension HTML Validator .
I tested several extensions with the same goal in Chrome, but nothing that was really good. Some just used the W3C validation service through the page's URL, which is not good, because when you are developing a page that is not public service W3C can not access it, and any user logged into the site you is developing can not access it.
Other extensions have tried to copy the currently loaded page and pass it to the validation service, but none showed any invalid HTML code that the Firefox extension HTML Validator shows.
It also does not rely on an external validation service. That means you can validate pages even if you do not have internet access. So for all these reasons, an equivalent version of the HTML Validator extension is sorely needed for Chrome.
3. Disable JavaScript
Sometimes you need to test your site with JavaScript disabled. The only way to disable it in Chrome is going to preferences and disable. This is truly annoying. In Firefox, you can use the extension Web Developer by Chris Pederick to add a button to the browser to quickly disable and re-enable JavaScript when you want.
In Chrome, there is also the extension Web Developer the same developer, but it provides no means to disable JavaScript. The problem is due to the limitation of the API exposed to Chrome extensions. It does not allow a way to disable JavaScript from extensions.
There is a request for funding for the project Chromium to implement the necessary support to disable JavaScript. Implementing this feature was actually given a year ago, but it never happened. Oddly, users have been banned from posting future comments on the application of this feature.
4. Empty the browser cache
Sometimes you need to force the cleanup of the browser cache, so that new content can be recovered from the site server you are developing.
It is the same limitation to disable JavaScript. You can not do this through an extension. You need to go in the preferences of Chrome.
There is also a feature request to enable support for clearing the cache from an extension. It was made more than two years, but only a few months ago was released for implementation.
5. Changing the agent identifier of the browser
Sometimes you need to access your site pretending to be developing using another browser, so you can see if it fits to that browser the way you expect.
For example, if you are serving an RSS feed to be handled by Feedburner, all you need to redirect browsers to the URL of the Feedburner feed, unless the current agent is checking if your Feedburner feed has been updated. Therefore, it would be helpful if you could cause the browser to pretend to be the Feedburner, so you could check if he was working as it should.
In Firefox, you can use the extension User Agent Switcher also Chris Pederick. In Chrome, there is also an extension called User Agent Switcher . The problem is that it does not work. Good works, but not the way you want. The extension can only change the browser identification exposed to JavaScript. This means that HTTP requests sent to the server will not use the string identifying the agent that you need to be sent.
I suspect that an application for resource to be implemented in Chromium, but not found. Until this feature is implemented, we will always have to go back to Firefox, which works well with the User Agent Switcher extension.
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