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Firefox Developer Edition vs. Chrome

4 points by wirddin ↗ HN
I'm stuck with chrome and planning to move to FDE. But something keeps me pulling back to Chrome. What do you guys use and why? And why did you ditch the other option?

P.S. Please mention the OS you develop on as well.

I know some people use different browsers for normal browsing and development. Keep web development in mind. For normal browsing, I would love to switch to Safari :)

* Basically, convince me why I should switch to FDE ( Chrome's a battery sucker on my macbook )

5 comments

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theklr
Neutral. FDE if I want to do some front-end work that's effective on most browsers (usually Chrome's tools can render radically different than others) plus Mozilla's constantly adding more features that I'd find more useful now, over future proofing(web console, 3d layering, audio analysis). Also both Windows and OSX give similar experiences. Finally not a memory hog. If you're truly concerned about battery performance use safari. FDE is slightly better in performance.
wirddin
Got it. After reading about all three on the web I found out that Chrome's a memory hog and sucks up the battery. So FDE stands between Safari and Chrome on the battery/memory line?

"FDE is slightly better in performance" - than Chrome? Haven't tried it on Mac, but on Windows Chrome seemed snappier than Firefox / Firefox Dev Edition.

ludbb
Is there such a thing as "moving" to another browser for development purposes? You will have to use both at some point, at least for some sanity check.

If you're developing something with React, Chrome will provide a better experience since React dev tools plugin is only available for Chrome. I'm not aware of some tool that is exclusive to Firefox, so I don't have a reason to favor it.

wirddin
For most of the backend, I try to stick to one browser. Right now Chrome gives me all the request details and other things I need. But I want to see where FDE stands on this.
anonfunction
I really love the developer command line in recent versions of Firefox. Shift + f2 brings it up.