Previously, when I went to a new browser experience, I generally went to a new browser.
There was Mosaic. Then Netscape. Then Galeon. Then Konqueror. Then Mozilla. Then Firefox.
Galeon was probably the most jarring of the bunch. It started as a highly power-user friendly advanced (for the time) browser. Then the GNOME project "adopted" it as its default browser ... and instilled it with "simple user" disease. Many features were ripped out, and much of the userbase left in disgust (there are a few postings by Jon Corbet and other at LWN.net I recall). Eventually it was replaced by Epiphany, a pale shadow of the original.
Life would have been better if the rebranding had happened first.
And we'll note that Mozilla has already gone this route several times: Netscape -> Mozilla -> Phoenix -> Firefox. They should have taken this as a new fork as well.
Mozilla kept me from Firefox for years. The idiotic "view source" that actually re-fetched the page made it utterly worthless for development and when the bugs were filed, they were promptly ignored.
That said, with the except of one FF push on OSX that broke Netflix for a few days I've been pleased with the changes. Safari's constant memory leaks drove me nuts, FF leaking memory wasn't as bad but certainly annoyed. They've solved that problem for my usage and having suffered with Chrome "dev tools" I continue to use FF and Firebug for front-end work when need be.
oh galeon, how i miss thee, particularly your sane address bar tab-completion. anyone know if there's anything comparable as a chrome extension or firefox addon?
What was the address-bar tab-completion functionality?
Have you tried Vimperator for Firefox?
Modal, action happens on a status line at the bottom of the screen (allowing you to minimize navigation elements -- no navigation, menu, or toolbars). To open a new tab, type "t <pattern><tab>", where "pattern" is either part of a URL or the title of a page or bookmark. To open Hacker News, for example, I generally type "t hack<tab>". If there are multiple matches, they appear as a list of items you can tab through (or which shrinks as you type additional characters for greater specificity). I like it.
Chrome's navigation is similar, but not quite as slick.
Previously, when I went to a new browser experience, I generally went to a new browser.
There was Mosaic. Then Netscape. Then Galeon. Then Konqueror. Then Mozilla. Then Firefox.
Galeon was probably the most jarring of the bunch. It started as a highly power-user friendly advanced (for the time) browser. Then the GNOME project "adopted" it as its default browser ... and instilled it with "simple user" disease. Many features were ripped out, and much of the userbase left in disgust (there are a few postings by Jon Corbet and other at LWN.net I recall). Eventually it was replaced by Epiphany, a pale shadow of the original.
Life would have been better if the rebranding had happened first.
And we'll note that Mozilla has already gone this route several times: Netscape -> Mozilla -> Phoenix -> Firefox. They should have taken this as a new fork as well.