Why I’ve Switched From Chrome to Firefox 4

You've probablyheard a lot about Firefox 4's new interface, speed, and feature improvements, but many of you have already left it for Chrome. Here's why Firefox's newest version is worth another look, even if you're a diehard Chrome user.

I've never been much of a Firefox user myself. I switched between browsers a lot until Chrome came out, after which I used it almost exclusively. It was fast, extensible, available on all platforms, and the more it gained in popularity, the better it became. Sure, it had its quirks, but it was the best I could get at the time. Firefox's slowness really turned me off, so I never really gave it a chance.

With everyone talking about how great Firefox 4 is, though, I decided to try it out. Most of the team at Lifehacker has switched to Chrome for their main browsing needs, but Chrome was starting to irk me in small ways and if Firefox could hold up on its promise of higher speed, it could actually sway me away from Chrome. A few days after switching, I fell in love and haven't looked back. If you haven't looked at Firefox in awhile (or never really used it in the past), here's why you might want to give it another shot.

It's Pretty Darn Fast

This was the big one. Firefox's sluggishness was the main thing keeping me away before, but now that Firefox has added some serious speed increases to its browser, it's not nearly as painful as it used to be. In fact, it's not painful at all. It might not be quite as fast as Chromesometimes, but it's pretty comparable, putting the two on a more level playing field and making Firefox's other advantages much more worth switching for.

A Minimal, Fully Customizable Interface

Firefox 4's new interface adds some nice improvements, like tabs on top, the Firefox menu, and the removal of the status bar. They've also gotten rid of or moved some of the more clutter-inducing navigation buttons, like the reload button, which is a welcome change.

The changes weren't perfectly executed, of course—the Firefox menu isn't in a great spot, and tabs on top doesn't actually save you any vertical pixels. However, Firefox's UI is so customizable that it doesn't really matter. We've already shown you how to move the Firefox menu to a more appropriate location, and use the extra space more efficiently for a Chrome-like tabs-on-top setup.

"But Lifehacker", I can already hear you Chrome fans saying, "how does making Firefox look like Chrome make it better than Chrome? Isn't it better to not have to do that work?" While Firefox's UI isn't as great as Chrome's out of the box, what makes Firefox decidedly better is that you can customize it to an insane extent. Once you've gotten rid of the things you don't like, you can add the things you do like. Chrome lets you make one change to the navigation bar: you can add a home button. Beyond that, you're on your own. Firefox lets you add a full screen button, zoom controls, an RSS button, a bookmarks menu, and a ton more out of the box, and even tell it whether to use small or large icons. Sure, you can do a lot of this in Chrome with extra extensions, but Firefox already has it all there.

Furthermore, Firefox has that handyuserChrome.css file that lets you really dig down and tweak every pixel of the interface—literally. We feature tweaks for the userChrome file all the time, here on Lifehacker—like this recent URL preview hack, as well as a trick to make the Firefox button a little less annoyingly neon. And, with all the Firefox users out there, you can pretty much Google anything you want to change about Firefox's interface and find a CSS tweak.

Don't forget about the Stylish add-on, either, which lets you tweak not just Firefox's interface, but the interface of nearly any web site you want, which can be extremely handy.

About:Config

It certainly isn't new to Firefox 4, but theabout:config page is still one of the best features Firefox has to offer. Just like theuserChrome.css file, it lets you tweak a tonof different preferences that aren't available in the normal preferences menu. Want to preview open tabs when you cycle through them using Ctrl+Tab? There's an about:config tweak for that. Annoyed that Firefox automatically enters "Work Offline" mode when you disconnect? There's a tweak for that too. There are also tweaks for making spellcheck stand out more, making it ask to save your tabs when you quit, and save memory by waiting to load tabs until you click on them. Sure, Chrome has that neat about:flags page, and it is a bit easier to use—but it doesn't give you anywhere near the power Firefox's about:config page does. In the end, bothuserChrome.css and about:config are all about customization. Firefox gives you a level of customization that is just unparalleled in other browsers.

You Can Actually Sync Custom Search Engines

This seems like a small thing, but is actually a huge deal to anyone that uses custom search engines. I use them for every search engine I frequent, whether it's searching for old posts on Lifehacker, videos on YouTube, or even for guitar tabs on Ultimate-Guitar.com. Not only that, but you can use them to perform nearly any task right from your browser's address bar, like add an event to your calendar, a task to your to-do list, find directions with Google Maps, and a ton more.

They've become such an integral part of my browsing that it's infuriating that I can't sync them between Chrome installations—as soon as I pick up one of my other computers or boot into one of my other partitions, I have to create them all over again. Since Firefox actually integrates these into your bookmarks, they sync right along with your bookmarks, whether you're using Firefox Sync or something like Xmarks. It's a feature that Chrome is severely lacking, and that Firefox has had all along.

Mobile Sync

Very strangely, Android users can sync better with Firefox than they can with Chrome—they just need Firefox Mobile. Firefox Mobile syncs with Firefox on your desktop better than Android's browser ever synced with Chrome. You can sync your bookmarks, history, passwords, form data, and open tabs between the two, so when it's time to leave your computer and browse on your phone, you can start your session right back up. Chrome only has one-way link sharing with Chrome to Phone, after which you'd need to seek out a bunch of other add-ons to even come close to the same syncability. If you browse on your phone, Firefox makes it easier than ever.

Security Certificates

This is something you may not run into often, but it was one of the first things that made me want to leave Chrome. Chrome doesn't seem to handle SSL certificates in nearly the polished way Firefox does. If you visit a secure page that isn't trusted, Firefox will let you add an exception with the click of a button. Chrome is much more hard-headed about this, which is annoying when you know the page is trustworthy. In fact, sometimes Chrome won't even give you the option of going through to the page—it'll just throw you an error. A browser isn't very useful when it doesn't let you access sites you need regularly.

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None of this is to say that Firefox is perfect, of course. It doesn't have quite the "smoothness" that Chrome does, and if you leave it open for more than a day, it'll steal more of your memory than a bottle of José Cuervo, but overall Firefox's stability and customizability have won me over. If you've given Firefox 4 a try and have any thoughts on the matter—whether you agree or disagree—be sure to share them in the comments below.

Why browsers differ on Web sites' safety

For all the tens of billions of dollars a year spent on Internet security a year, on everything from antivirus software to intrusion prevention, there's one component that's vital but remains obscure: which Web sites browsers decide to trust.

Each of the major browser makers has compiled a different list of who possesses the master keys to Web authentication--namely, who can be trusted to issue the secure digital certificates to create encrypted channels--and each has different procedures for approval. A closed lock icon typically appears in a browser and an "https://" connection is displayed when a Web site is deemed legitimate.

The flaws in this system were thrown into sharp relief by last week's revelation that a hacker traced to Iran obtained fake digital certificates for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies. Comodo, a Jersey City, N.J.-based firm, said it revoked the nine certificates as soon as it discovered the breach in a business partner's systems.

Today's system gives browser makers tremendous responsibility. Any list of so-called certificate authorities they include will be trusted by billions of Web browsers around the world, unless users take the time to change the settings. The surprise is, perhaps, that the lists of who's trusted aren't the same.

"Microsoft appears to generally trust a much larger set of certificate authorities than Mozilla does," says Peter Eckersley, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "That may be because Microsoft's criteria are easier to meet in practice, or because certificate authorities prioritize getting onto Microsoft's list first."

Mozilla ships Firefox with a list of about 150 trusted certificate authorities. The list included with Microsoft Windows, used by Internet Explorer, totals 321 as of last week.

Opera includes only 37. Apple's OS X operating system, which Safari relies on, trusts 79 certificate authorities. Google says Chrome uses the Windows or OS X lists; Google Checkout trusts 168. (See CNET's spreadsheet with comparisons.)

It's difficult to compare those numbers directly, though, because some certificate authorities are counted multiple times. VeriSign appears 55 times in Microsoft's list based on different types of products offered but only once in Opera's, for instance.

Microsoft explicitly trusts more government-operated certificate authorities than any other browser maker. The list includes: Brazil, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Slovenia, the United States, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Another complicating factor is that some browsers download updated lists of "root" certificate authorities as needed.

Opera's default "list starts out with a limited number of frequently used certificates," says Yngve Pettersen, a senior developer at Opera Software in Oslo, Norway. "The remainder are downloaded as needed from certs.opera.com when the user actually visits a site issued from a root...We pre-ship some roots and also some intermediates, while others are downloaded dynamically."

What makes the list of trusted certificate authorities crucial is that each possesses the master keys to Web authentication. Companies like Etisalat, a wireless carrier in the United Arab Emirates that implanted spyware on customers' BlackBerry devices, can generate certificates that can be used to impersonate any secure Web site on the Internet. So do more than 100 German universities, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and random organizations like the Gemini Observatory, which operates a pair of 8.1-meter-diameter telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.

A fraudulent certificate would allow a network provider (or a government) to use what's known as a man-in-the-middle attack to impersonate the legitimate sites and grab passwords, read e-mail messages, and monitor any other activities on those Web sites, even if browsers show that the connections were securely protected with SSL encryption. And in the last few years, plenty of other techniques have emerged to trick computers into visiting fake Web sites even without control of the network.

Microsoft says it included the Tunisian government as a trusted certificate authority after it went through the normal application process.

"Microsoft requires that certificate authorities applying to the program provide standardized information," says Bruce Cowper, Microsoft's group manager for trustworthy computing. Tunisia applied in 2006, he said, and its certificate was distributed in February 2007. Venezuela applied in September 2010, and was approved a month later.

Cowper declined to provide information about how many companies, organizations, or governments have failed to pass muster, saying "Microsoft does not share specific information about denied applications, but we do reject applications from certificate authorities who don't meet our criteria (or) fall into one of the named exclusions from the program." Microsoft's specifications say that any certificate authority that fails an audit, for instance, will be given the boot.

If a certificate authority "isn't in our list it is either because they have not asked to be included, or have not yet been approved," says Opera's Pettersen. "So far, I don't think we have refused any certificate authorities that have applied." Neither Tunisia nor Venezuela have sent Opera an application to be included, he said.

Neither Apple nor Comodo responded to requests for comment.

While both Microsoft and Opera make their criteria public, Mozilla goes further and even makes the list of pending applications public. Those include a certificate authority operated government of the Valencia region of Spain and Deutscher Sparkassen Verlag GmbH, the world's largest smartcard provider.

As a result of the Comodo breach (Comodo is currently trusted by all the major browsers), there's been talk among Mozilla developers of imposing what amounts to the Internet death penalty: revoking the company's certificate authority, at least until a security audit is performed, from the default Firefox configuration.

Lending ammunition to critics is that this is not the first time that Comodo has experienced a serious security breach. In 2008, a reseller issued an improperly acquired certificate for Mozilla.org.

And Comodo's chief technology officer, Robin Alden, wrote in February 2010 that, before issuing a certificate, "Comodo performs an automated check of domain control by sending (and confirming receipt of) an email to an address which is either on the domain to be validated or is explicitly mentioned in the Whois entry."

That apparently wasn't done when a Comodo business partner issued those fraudulent certificates earlier this month. Comodo declined to answer questions that CNET posed last week, including the identity of its reseller, what current audits were performed, and how much authority it delegates to partners.

Artificial leaf' makes hydrogen from solar cell

Drawing from nature, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Daniel Nocera thinks he can draw cheap and clean energy from water.

At the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Nocera yesterday presented results from research on making an "artificial leaf" to split water to get hydrogen fuel and oxygen. The goal is to use the solar cell to make hydrogen, which would be stored and then used in a fuel cell to make electricity.

"The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station," Nocera said in a statement.

In 2009, Nocera and others created Sun Catalytix to commercialize his work on relatively cheap catalysts made from nickel and cobalt for a device called an electrolyzer that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The company in the fall raised more money from Indian industrial giant Tata.

Using a $4 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), researchers at Sun Catalytix began work on their second-generation product. Rather than use an electrolyzer to make hydrogen, this product would make hydrogen directly from a solar cell. That would mean a renewable source for the hydrogen fuel and electricity.

Until now, research yielded very low efficiencies in converting sunlight to hydrogen using a solar cell. Nocera yesterday said that researchers are optimistic they can boost the efficiency rate and the durability of the material. In the lab, he said that an artificial leaf prototype operated for 45 hours without a degradation in performance.

At the ARPA-E Summit earlier this month where Sun Catalytix showed a prototype of its second-generation product, company executives said the research will take a few years to complete and about three to five years to create a commercial product.

Nanoscale battering of charging battery seen on video

Video: Charged nanowire twists and deforms

If there is one thing stalling electric car development, preventing renewable energy sources from plugging into electricity grids and causing grief to smartphone users, it is poorly performing batteries. The first high-resolution video to show exactly how battery electrodes twist and distort during charging could be an important step towards designing the batteries that today's technologists are waiting for.

A US-Chinese team of nanotechnologists used a specially outfitted transmission electron microscope to capture the footage, allowing the effect of electrical charging on nanostructures to be seen in action for the first time.

For the experiment, the team built a tiny battery with a lithium-cobalt anode and a cathode made from tin oxide nanowires just 200 nanometres wide. Tin oxide is not much use in commercial batteries because it can only take a single charging, but in that charging it experiences dramatic effects. This makes it an excellent material for studying the subtle battery fatigue experienced by more commercially useful materials.

In the time-lapse video above, taken as the battery is charged by electrons pumping into the tin oxide, lithium ions can be seen streaming though the hollow nanowire to pair with the electrons. As they do, the nanowire contorts, lengthening by 90 per cent and swelling to two-and-a-half times its former volume. Further microscopy of the nanowire showed that the structure of the tin oxide atoms had changed from an ordered crystalline arrangement to an amorphous glass-like form. However, nanowires were able to withstand the effects of charging better than bulk tin oxide, a finding that may influence the design of future batteries.

Evolution to failure

Electronics manufacturers have long known that repeated charging cycles damage a battery's electrodes, but the findings shed light on how this wear and tear accumulates at the nano scale. "Cyclic charge and discharge of a battery induces structural evolution of the active materials, and such a structural evolution is attributed to the failure of the battery," says team member Chongmin Wang at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. "What we have done is to pioneer a way to observe how this structural evolution may occur."

Wang told New Scientist that the same method could be used to study commercial batteries. The team plans to create fully functioning nano-sized rechargeable batteries to observe the effect of repeated charging cycles.

42Mbps 4G Phone

Well isn't this awkward! A day after AT&T declared it was swallowing T-Mobile, T-Mobile is announcing the G2x, a Tegra 2, Android smartphone that holds the distinction of being the first to support T-Mobiles 42 Mbps 4G network.

Like most other Android phones right now, the LG-manufactured G2x has a 4-inch screen, a 1GHz dual-core processor, and a more-than-suitable 8-megapixel rear camera. That it runs Android Froyo and not Gingerbread is kind of a bummer, but whatever. As for pricing and availability, T-Mobile says it will be available "later this spring." And that's about the extent of it for now. Um, great!

What’s New and Awesome in Firefox 4

Windows/Mac/Linux: Firefox 4 is officially out, and it's got a lot going for it, including a more minimalistic interface, synchronization, and a serious speed increase. Here's what you have to look forward to in Firefox 4.

Speed

One of the biggest complaints people make about Firefox is, luckily, one of the biggest improvements in Firefox 4: its speed. Firefox is much faster than it was before, whether we're talking JavaScript performance (using its new Jägermonkey engine), startup times, or graphics. We'll have our own speed tests out soon, but Mozilla's boasting that it's three to six times faster than its predecessors—which is pretty believable once you take this thing for a spin. Even if you ran the beta back in the summertime, you'll want to check it out again—it's improved remarkably even since the earlier versions.

It's also worth noting that it's integrated a BarTab-like feature into the browser that loads your focused tab first when you restore a session. Then it starts loading the others, so they're ready when you switch to them. That way, you can get right to browsing and it will load your other tabs as you work on that first page, without crashing under the load of trying to render a million tabs at once.

Minimalistic Interface

Netbook fans rejoice; Firefox is now far more pixel-friendly. It's moved the tabs to the top of the window, which saves a ton of space (though you can put them back on the bottom if you prefer). It's also given you the option of putting all its menus in a new "Firefox" button on Windows and Linux that sits in the upper right-hand corner of the window (not unlike the "wrench" button we've come to know and love in Chrome).

It's even saved a bit of horizontal space in the toolbar, moving the reload and stop buttons into your address bar and making it one small condensed button. It might throw you off a bit at first, but it's really nice to have that clean toolbar.

Tabs, Tabs, Tabs

Mozilla knows you love tabbed browsing, and it shows in Firefox 4. Some of the biggest feature improvements have to do with how you manage your tabs, not the least of which is the great Tab Panorama organization window. It's basically a little window that shows a visual layout of your open tabs and lets you organize them by task (or into a handy to-do list). You can even open only one group at a time, so Firefox saves your other groups but doesn't clutter your tab bar with them. Check out the video above for a demonstration.

As if that weren't enough, they've also added a few other handy features. You can now "pin" tabs like you can in Google Chrome, which sends a tab to the left side of your tab bar as a tiny, favicon-only tab for those sites you keep open all the time (adding also to the minimalistic, space-saving interface mentioned above). You can also search for an open tab in Firefox's address bar and switch to it, saving you from opening up tabs you already have and making it quicker to jump to them.

Firefox Sync

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Firefox Sync brings password, bookmark, history, open tab, and setting synchronization to Firefox. I'm not about to leave the comfort of the cross-browser Xmarks and LastPass for most of that, but this is a pretty nice feature for the preference syncing alone. Now, when you get a new computer or do a reinstall, you don't have to setup Firefox the way you like it—all your preferences will be immediately synced there. Bonus: if you're using Firefox mobile on Android or Maemo, you'll be able to sync all that info to your mobile device too, which is fantastic.

Other Improvements

Those are some of the biggest additions to Firefox 4, but it's certainly not all. Firefox is also stepping up its game with support for the WebM video format, full hardware acceleration for better graphics, plugin sandboxing for better crash protection, extra privacy protection, and increased HTML5 and CSS3 support. For the full list of new features, be sure to check outMozilla's introduction page, or download it and take it for a spin yourself. And, if you've got a favorite new feature, let us know what it is and why in the comments. And, if you find that you have incompatible add-ons, you can try and get them working with Mozilla's Add-On Compatibility Reporter.

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