But Firefox has always had its issues. The great Firefox memory hole has consistently shrunk with each new release, but it still exists, bringing the browser to a grinding halt with disturbing regularity. Page rendering speeds have improved over the years, but they haven’t necessarily kept pace with the increasing complexity of application-weight websites.

I want a browser that gets out of my way. Pages should load quickly and render perfectly, there shouldn’t be any delays switching between tabs, and the browser should have useful tools for analyzing and inspecting site source code – all while remaining stable and using a minimum of operating system resources.

So, lately I’ve been doing all of my browsing (and development) with Google Chrome. I started using Chrome last year on Windows out of sheer curiosity, but quickly dropped it and returned to Firefox. But Chrome, too, has been growing and evolving, along with the WebKit engine that it runs on. WebKit has the best CSS3 support of any browser, letting me test out all the newest techniques without waiting for Firefox to add support. Chrome is now quite solid, even in its developer releases, and incredibly fast. And while there are times that I miss the Firebug extension for Firefox, WebKit’s “Inspect Element” pane has evolved into a quite capable replacement for my purposes, especially when combined with new Chrome extensions like Pendule.

Am I done with Firefox? Certainly not. Firefox is the world’s second most popular browser, and for good reason; Firefox dramatically raised the bar for what users could expect from a web browser, and it continues to improve through regular releases year after year. It is still the browser that I would recommend to anyone for general use, and I will continue to test every site I create in Firefox (along with Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer). When using Chrome, I miss the ability to search Google, Wikipedia, and more from a tiny search box in the upper right (Update: I just needed to “Edit Search Engines“), and Firefox’s add-ons feel a lot more robust than Chrome’s extensions.

But at this time, for my own use, Chrome has supplanted Firefox.

(P.S. – I’m still looking forward to the impending Firefox 3.6. I may be switching back if I’m suitably impressed. It’s so wonderful to live in a time where we have real competition between browser makers!)

Image from Google Blogoscoped