I compare browsers often and don't get all the hate...
I often go through browsers for my department at school and test the latest and greatest. At least twice a month I go through and test multiple versions of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Other more obscure browsers I leave alone unless they pop up as something that is prevalent on the network.
I've been using Firefox 20a1 and next to Chrome Canary 26.0.1378.0 and the nightly Webkit for Safari I personally don't see all that much difference. I've even done tests on my coworkers where I've covered the navigation bars at the top of the screen with paper to see if people could guess by perceived screen which browser they were looking at by load times. Webkit browsers when they are on, they are on and do get guessed correctly, but just as often Firefox and Opera can fool them almost 50% of the time on certain sites. They are all fast. It just depends.
Chrome is obviously more web compliant when it comes to the html5 support hands down. It runs sites smooth and always scores extremely high on just about any test I throw at it. A person can't argue that, but lightning fast COMPARED to Firefox, no. I see Chrome hang on sites that Firefox doesn't and vise versa. Webkit is good on some sites and not on others. It just depends.
Chrome is responsive and sold, and so is Safari. Safari just feels smooth on the mac... but I don't see these hangs, unresponsiveness, or crashes in Firefox on a daily basis. About all I get annoyed about is the yahoo news videos that don't always play for some reason. I really don't see how Firefox is any uglier than say Safari either.
I can't use Chrome because it's just too rudimentary when it comes to bookmarks and searching. I do a lot of research and I need more control over what I see, what I get, and how I can organize it.
Chrome just can't do it. I've discussed my issues in Chromes forums and I'm not the only person who has gone around and around with Chromes developers.
Talk about people who don't care.
They are so arrogant that they just flat out tell the thousands of people asking for a feature they don't care and won't implement it.
Safari at least makes and attempt to not only delineate what search results your looking at, but it also tries to organize to an extent. It's not too bad, but lacks a little. Bookmarks are better than Chrome, but still no Keywords or anything.
Chromes search engine search is an okay substitute for keywords, but not the same when you get into it and use it.
My issues with Chrome that keep me in Firefox:
Proxy (independent of the OS)
search bar result prioritization.
search bar exclusion of certain things.
Bookmark organization and Keywords
Download organization
Printing (Chrome's gotten better, but still not there).
Memory usage (Chrome spreads out its memory usage over many processes and routinely uses cumulatively more than FF).
Chrome doesn't always dump all the memory used like people say, but is good about it mostly.
CPU usage (little bit higher usage and thus kills off about 35 minutes on a full battery charge on my MBP w/flashblock).
My tests have consistently shown Safari to be about the best on battery consumption on a portable. For me, Firefox comes in on average 12 minutes under Safari's battery life. Opera is similar to Firefox on battery. Chrome is always last.
If a student comes into me and says I need advise, I want battery life to get me through the day, I tell them Safari, FF or Opera. If they say they are worried about browser crashes, I tell them to try Chrome as long as they don't expect too much in the way of customizing. Plenty of add ons though I think.
I personally still use Firefox.
