Firefox Panorama Looks Cool, But Speed Kills

By Jake • August 25th, 2010 • 13 Comments

The latest Firefox 4 beta build (beta 4) includes the Tab Candy feature, which has been named Panorama.

Firefox Panorama: Tab Candy Evolved « Aza on Design

I’m running this version on Ubuntu, but not as my primary browser. Panorama looks cool, and tab organization is a nice to have feature, albeit probably a power user feature.

The problem for me is that Chrome (and Chromium) are still faster than Firefox, primarily at Javascript rendering. No, I haven’t seen any tests with Firefox 4 vs. Chrome 6, but it’s going to take a major improvement in speed to switch me back to Firefox.

What about you? What’s your browser of choice and why? Do features like Panorama matter more than flat out speed?

Find the comments.


Possibly Related Posts

  • Chris

    Wrong place to ask I am sure, but does Chrome allow you to specify when and if it automatically updates? I tried Chrome BETA. It didn’t. I haven’t been back since.

  • http://blog.amr-gawish.com/ agawish

    I switched to Firefox 4 and its coming great, all my firefox plugins are still working, and the speed has been improved in a good way.
    There are still some crashes in visual here and the there but overall a great experience.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Yeah, but it’s not as fast as Chrome, which has evolved into a better brower IMO. I wonder how Firefox will keep up, as long as they’re tied to Gecko. WebKit browsers keep raising the bar.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Chrome keeps itself updated automatically, e.g. I’ve been running the Dev build for a while, and it has just upgraded itself from 6.0 to 7.0 today. I like the background updating.

  • Chris

    I’ll take that as a “no”. Oh, well. Doesn’t work so well when I am trying to run voip off my laptop in India on a slow hotel network and something is out there trying to do a download.

  • Bob

    Is there a 64-bit version of Chrome? I never saw one. I am using the 64-bit builds of Firefox and will not use a 32-bit browser again. As for speed, my 64-bit Firefox is quite quick, I mean I am not waiting for anything to appear. Any further speed improvement will be useless for me since I already don’t notice any wait.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    You can build a 64-bit Chromium version for Linux. See here:

    http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/64-bit-support

    A little research shows that the V8 JS engine is the hold-up, ironically, for a 64-bit version on all OS. I suspect it won’t be long until they drop 64-bit versions though. Development moves very quickly. Chrome is at version 7 in the development builds. It’s 1.0 version dropped in September 2008.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    The answer is it depends. On Mac, it updates itself, no scheduling. On Ubuntu, you have to take the updates from the Google repository. On Windows, I’ve no idea really. I don’t use Windows much, so each time, I’ve updated it manually.

  • Dave T

    Are Mozilla intentionally trying to confuse their users? Why on earth does Panorama hide one group when you want to view another?!

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Heh, I did find the video a bit confusing. I haven’t used the feature yet, and that might not be the final implementation. I’m with you on the interactions.

  • http://exde601e.blogspot.com/ George M.

    There are ways, even on Windows, using Group policies and/or registry edits. Take a look at this link: http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2010/06/01/how-to-disable-google-chrome-updates/