[gaelian]

My experience so far has shown that if you're looking for an exact one-to-one duplication of the FF experience, then yeah, Chrome's not there yet and possibly never will be.

Coming from FF I had this funny moment when I opened up the Chrome preferences menu and it opened in a tab, just like a web page (I assume because it is just a web page) and I thought "huh, that feels a little strange..." then I opened up some extension's options page and it was just a web page too and I thought "Actually, preferences and options as just plain web pages is really cool and intuitive after getting over the subtle shock of them not being in those little pop-up dialogs." It unifies things nicely and this approach is one of the reasons why extension development in Chrome can be made so intuitive for people already experienced with web technologies.

Regarding the slow performance of FF lately: I remember some months ago I had this situation where I was trying to debug a JS powered upload progress bar I was working on which relied on AJAX calls to update the length of the bar and it just wasn't updating or it would update once, then nothing until the very end when it would shoot to 100%. Watching in Firebug, AJAX calls were being made but seemingly nothing was coming back. I was stumped, I tried everything I could think of, until by chance I tried turning Firebug off and bam! My upload progress bar started working perfectly. JS in Firefox with Firebug on top of it was slow enough that the multiple AJAX calls needed by the upload progress bar weren't working properly anymore. Looking back, I think that day the seed was planted for my move to Chrome.