Firefox 4 vs Chrome 11 | Speed, Performance, Features Compared
Google Chrome 11 is the latest release of the web browser developed by Google. It was released on April 28, 2011. At the moment, Google Chrome is the third most widely used web browser and around ten-percent of browser users in the world use Google Chrome. Firefox 4 is the latest release of the web browser developed by Mozilla, which was released on March 22, 2011. Firefox is the second most widely used web browser used by thirty-percent of browser users world wide.
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a free web browser but it is not fully open source. Google has released a large portion of its code as a separate open source project called Chromium. Google Chrome 11 uses WebKit layout engine and V8 JavaScript engine. Chrome is known for its security, stability and speed. Chrome provides high application performance and JavaScript processing speed. Chrome was the first to implement the OminiBox, which is a single input field that works as the address bar as well as search bar (though this feature was first introduced by Mozilla for their browser Firefox). Due to its comparatively (very) short release cycle of 6 weeks, Chrome 11 was released within two months after the release date of Chrome 10. One negative criticism that is associated by the users is its comparatively high emphasis on usage tracking functionality. In addition to its high security, stability and speed., Chrome 11 introduced several amazing new features, some of which are in fact introduced for the first time ever in to browsers. An HTML speech translator, which uses the power of HTML5, has been introduced. The user can speak in to the computer or any other device running Chrome browser and it will convert your speech in to 50 other languages. Users can even listen to the real-time translation using the listen feature. GPU-accelerated 3D CSS support has been added. This means that, Chrome will support websites with 3D effects using CSS.
Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is a free and open source web browser. Firefox 4 adds improved support for HTML5, CSS3, WebM and WebGL, by utilizing the power of Gecko 2.0 engine. A new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey is included. The primary goals for the version 4 of this already impressive browser were improvements in performance, standards support, and user interface. Firefox 4 introduced a new and improved user interface to make it faster. A feature called Firefox Panorama allows the user to organize tabs into windows called groups and apply same operation on all tabs in a group. By default, tabs are now on top of the page, almost exactly similar to Chrome. Stop, Reload and Go buttons have been combined in to a single button, which changes state according to the current state of the page. An audio API has been introduced in Firefox 4, which allows programmatically accessing or creating audio data associated with HTML5 audio element. This feature can be used to visualize, filter or show audio spectrums. Firefox 4 now offers a consistent layout/shaping across different operating systems. Other notable features are doorhanger notifications, application tabs and support for multitouch displays.
Because of the intense nature of browser war in recent times, it is obvious that both Chrome 11 and Firefox 4 have latest features and it’s hard to decide which is better. But they do have their differences. Although, Firefox has improved a lot in the area of the user interface, Chrome is known for its easy to use, simple and fast user interface. Although, Firefox 4 is incredibly fast, Chrome 11 performs comparatively better in many benchmark tests for speed. In the area of add-ons, Firefox 4 is still the leader, simply because there are lots of attractive free add-ons available for Firefox than Chrome. If the usage of heavy user graphics and related add-ons are high, Firefox is better to use than Chrome. However, when it comes to simple and fast browsing, Chrome 11 is still the ideal browser. But finally, and maybe most importantly for some users, Chrome 11 is the only browser that supports speech translation at the moment.