A Mac Web Developer's Perspective: Replacing FireFox With Google Chrome (or no more bloat)
Aug
16
2010
If you are a web developer, like me you have probably grown to rely on FireFox as a web development tool. Whether you develop with Drupal, Joomla, CSS / HTML, PHP or some other CMS platform or language, it's surely a staple of your web dev toolbox. Lately, it seems that FireFox 3.6.x for Mac has been running very slow and has become quite bloated. I often get the infamous spinning wheel after the browser has been running for more than a day.
I have tried all the usual fixes like disabling extensions (and adding back in one by one), safe mode, reinstall, trashing preferences, clearing history etc.. but none of these suggested fixes seemed to work. I have a fairly recent Mac -- 2.4 Ghz Core 2 duo with 4 GB RAM and OS X 10.6.4. I have also tried closing other applications as well to see if there was some other application conflicting but this was not the case. I even did a complete system reinstall and disk wipe to find out if there was some unknown issue that I just was not seeing.
Enter Google Chrome for Mac. It has a built in "Firebug" like inspector and you can also add your other favorite web development extensions to Chrome for Mac to emulate your FireFox web developer environment as Chrome has an extensible plug-in architecture. And the main benefit of all this: Chrome for Mac seems very fast compared to FireFox. Heck, even the Drupal admin interface (which I am writing this post in) seems to fly using Chrome! One issue that was facing me was the lack of support of 1Password for Chrome but I discovered that the developer version of Chrome supports 1Password. This kind of sealed the deal for me for Chrome for Mac becoming my full time web development browser of choice.
Below you will find a list of resources for tools, plug-ins and links I found useful for making Chrome my web development browser. This is somewhat of an experiment as I have grown to rely heavily on FireFox + developer tools for developing web sites, so I will at least try this for a week and see if this setup can become something more permanent. I'll post back on my findings to see if this is a viable alternative.
If you have any favorite Google Chrome web development plug-ins, please feel free to leave a comment with a link!
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Me too
The same arguments counts for me too. I have changed my long love with firefox to slick and user friendly chrome.
I have missed only few features of firefox Webdeveloper toolbar so far.
The memory usage goes 100-0 for chrome. Stable.
Agreed
I'm starting to use it a lot more nowadays. I have always used firefox for development, especially CSS, and then 'tested' in other browsers.
I use it for youtube and other google sites, and it's a lot slicker. I'll try out some local VM copies of drupal sites and see how much better they run.
Thanks for posting the extensions.