Anyone who knows me knows that I have long been a big supporter of Firefox.  Back in the day, Firefox was the breath of fresh air in the otherwise olfactory-oppressing wasteland of an IE-dominated interwebs.  Firefox was fast, innovative, and, best of all, let you add stuff on to it.

Add cool stuff.  Like Pay-Pal plugins.  Like RSS readers.  Like Firebug.

It was the bees’ knees, and looked like it was going to gobble up all the stragglers that IE left in its “who cares about the experience” attitude toward the internet.

But then Chrome came along.  It was sleek.  It was fast.  And best of all, it brought some fresher-than-Firefox ideas to browsing.

Better, fresher ideas.  Like tabs-on-top.  Like better architecture for faster…everything.  Like not-having-to-upgrade-every-2.5-seconds.

So I’ve been using Chrome alot lately.  Sure, it’s different.  But what I’ve found is that it’s better.  Sure, it doesn’t have Firebug (which is probably the only reason whatsoever that I continue to use Firefox).  But every version gets better.  And faster.  And awesomer.

And Firefox?  Perhaps its my groaning, Vista-laden PC, but Firefox hates everything.  It’s slow, it freezes, it crashes…and very few of the plugins that I depend on for Firefox to be awesome can keep up with the releases.

And the things I’ve been seeing for v4 are less than impressive.  The other day I watched a video on their “new” feature for 4–tabs on top.

Tabs on top.

Hmmm…where have I seen that before?  Oh yeah, every other browser to update its version in the last 6 months.

Now in all fairness, tabs on top makes sense, and the logic in the video–IMO–is pretty well founded.  But it just feels like a lot of far too little and way too late.

Obviously, I’m going to keep using Firefox in some capacity.  There’s the perennial issue of cross-browser compatibility that I always have to wrangle for my work, and Firebug still destroys Chrome’s girly development tools. However, I see our paths steadily diverging, and see little opportunities for them to entwine again.