Celebrating 10 Years of Firefox
My love for Chrome ended and I switched back to Firefox about 3 months ago. The switch went well and I'm happy with my choice. Reasons:<p>1. First version of Chrome for the desktop supported extensions, because it was competing with a popular Firefox, and now on Android they don't give a shit about enabling users to customize the behavior of their browser, which pisses me off.<p>So I switched to Firefox on my Android because it allows me to use these plugins ... AdBlock Plus, HTTPS Everywhere + LastPass. Plus it has a handy Reader Mode, that's like  Readability built into my Firefox. And I find the UI nicer on my 7-inch tablet. This naturally led to a decision to switch to Firefox on the desktop too, because Sync.<p>2. In Firefox on my desktop I like having Tab Groups + the Awesome Bar (which does a good job of doing full text searches in my history, much better than what other browsers are capable of) + a really cool tweak to the Australis theme called "The Fox, Only Better" which is awesome and will make it much harder for me to switch browsers again.<p>I also love it when Mozilla develops something, then everybody benefits, like Asm.js or PDF.js. Try using Chromium instead of Chrome, it's not the same experience.<p>3. I've been all hooked into Google's stuff, I even pay for a Google Apps account and everything, but I noticed that Google hasn't been aligned with my interests.<p>For example they killed Google Reader to promote Google+, they showed no interest in fixing Gmail's broken IMAP support, they showed no interest in fixing Google Calendar's broken CalDAV support, they discontinued the Exchange support from Gmail, they discontinued the XMPP support from Google Hangouts, they announced no interest in providing alternatives that I know of, certain features in their online products only work in Chrome. It seems to me that Google is only interested in standards as long as they are the underdog.<p>I also moved to Dropbox as my cloud storage, because Google Drive still does not have a Linux client. I mean, Google out of all companies should think that Linux support also means headless servers (like home servers or other appliances), so providing Linux support should be obvious. But no, 2 years later, the OS X client is still shitty and still no Linux support. I have to trust my data to a third-party if I want that, or suffer one of the shitty open-source alternatives and risk my data.<p>So there you have it - Firefox is a great browser and it also tries to make me happy. And yes, I would also like the one-process per tab model, but they are actively working on it.<p>Happy Birthday Firefox.