At home, my wife and I use the same PC for our ‘couch browsing’, and since we don’t want to have to logoff & log back on every time to check our email, we’ve taken to using different browsers to handle it for us. She uses Firefox and I use Chrome – just because, when I installed it, Chrome was in beta and I wanted her using something familiar to her.

Having said that, the more I’ve used Chrome over the last months, the more I’ve liked it. Just to be clear, I’ve never disliked it: I just like Firefox more. But I’ve been finding myself more and more lately using Chrome instead of Firefox for my regular browsing, even on my main PC. Extensions have definitely helped here, but I think it’s just the rock-solid stability of it, the incredible ease of use, the minimal U/I approach (ok.. in Firefox this is my fault), and the SPEED.

I know that both Google and Mozilla are paying close attention to HTML5, too, and was surprised to see that, at the moment, Firefox seems to be leading Chrome for HTML5 and CSS3 support, although Youtube’s HTML5 video support is only for Chrome (and Safari) . I suspect (hope??) that this is going to be the next major battleground for web-standards, finally killing the proprietary standards of both Adobe Flashplayer and Microsoft’s Silverlight in one fell swoop. Hey, at least I can dream, right? I’m pleased to see that Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring HTML5, which is their M.O. for any new ‘standard’ that’s not theirs, and am hoping that this means that the IE standard will finally die. Again, probably wishful thinking.

update 3/3/10: DRAT! Microsoft is going to be paying attention to HTML5 after all.

So, here’s my list of plugins, in alphabetical order! I’m not really listing WHY I have them installed, but the links should be self-explanatory. I added some brief descriptions – May 8 2009. Suffice it to say that some of these won’t necessarily be of interest to anyone except a web developer/designer.

• Back to Close – enables your back button to close tabs if there’s no page to move back to.
  
• Ctrl-Tab – better switching between tabs
  
• CustomizeGoogle – customizes your search results in Google – highly recommended!
  
• Download Statusbar – download status that’s not so obtrusive as the download window.
  
• DownThemAll! – excellent download manager (pause, etc.)
  
• Firebug – development tool
  
• Glasser – UI enhancement (not compatible anymore)
  
• Hide Menubar – a bit more space in your UI
  
• IE Tab – must have if you want to be “Firefox-only”. This handles the occasional IE-only site.
  
• Stylish – allows users to customize their Firefox UI via CSS and Javascript.
  
• Tab Mix Plus – More tab options, tab close buttons, new tabs, etc.
  
• Ubiquity – command line & scripting interface for Firefox – try it! Very cool.
• Web Developer – all-in-one Javascript and CSS tool – must-have add-on for developers.
  
• Yet Another Smooth Scrolling – Nicer scrolling settings.
  
• YSlow – indispensible tool for tuning your sites.
  

Have any more I should install? Let me know!

BTW, for a theme, I’m running the pretty basic “Strata Aero”, customized with Stylish (I want my “active tab” to really stand out). I ended up having to completely disable Personas, since it was playing horribly with everything else.