Do I Ditch Safari & Chrome?

I use a Windows machine at work, and I will be for the forseeable future. I usually use Chrome on Windows, and on its own it’s still the best. Same goes for Safari on the Mac. However, I have found that Firefox has benefits that I didn’t realize.

Yes, Firefox’s interface is currently dated and increasingly ugly, particularly on OSX. It’s performance isn’t the fastest anymore, and you don’t get many Webkit CSS extensions. However, running Firefox on both Mac and Windows has made me much more productive because:

• Firefox Sync lets me save settings between both systems.
• 1Password lets me sync passwords between both systems, but only with Firefox and IE on Windows. Obvious choice there.
• I honestly don’t know if Webkit browsers have this, but Firefox lets me build keywords and custom search queries from bookmarks. Being able to search a particular site with Google by typing ‘/ee search topic’ is a godsend.
• User themes in Firefox are getting good enough that they can rectify the crappy UI problems with the default theme. I have a well made Chrome-inspired theme for Windows and a Camino knockoff for Mac that is almost as good. Not perfect replacements, but good enough to satisfy me.

I know that there are a lot of people who are tired of Firefox and performance issues they have had with it, or its subpar integration with OSX, et cetera. I don’t blame any of you for it, but in the end Firefox’s sheer flexibility has won me back over for the time being. At least until I have to play a video using H.264…