Let me explain where I am right now.

I've spent a great deal of time and care to cater my Firefox browsing experience to my liking. I make sure to limit the number of extensions I have installed to only the ones that are essential to me. I have all my settings tweaked just the way I like it. If I had to set up a computer from scratch, it would probably take me about half an hour to get my Firefox installation set up just how I like it, and that doesn't count bookmarks (because I get those through XMarks).

So now I'm trying out Chrome, and naturally I'm bumping into lots of little things that are different from what I'm used to. On the whole, I like the browser a lot, and it does seem faster, especially with Google sites (and it's not faster just because I have extensions in Firefox).

For the most part, I've been able to replicate most of the add-ons I use in Firefox. I have extensions for bookmark syncing (XMarks, though it doesn't do passwords yet which is not good but that's Google's fault), ad blocking, and a couple other specialized ones like Cool Iris (neat image viewer) and WiseStamp (customizable signatures for my GMail correspondence).

There are a few apps that I would like to have in Chrome but aren't essential, like the "Better" apps from Lifehacker/Gina Trapani for sites like Google Reader, GMail, and Google Calendar.

Lastly, there are some big items missing that are keeping me from switching for good:

Smart Bookmarks Toolbar - I suppose this is my most-used app in Firefox, because it contains all the links I use on a regular basis. This lets me auto-hide my bookmarks bar, and reduce it to only the icons. This saves me vertical space for displaying web pages (I'm big on a minimal browser window) and horizontal space for displaying all my most-used bookmarks. I've attached three screenshots to illustrate this. The first is what the Chrome bookmarks toolbar looks like (it gives me like 8 visible bookmarks) and the last two (1, 2) are the two states of my Firefox Smart Bookmarks Toolbar. I can't find anything that even alters my Chrome bookmarks bar, and they don't even have an option for hiding the text and just showing the favicons.

DownThemAll! - The best download manager I've found yet. I don't really care about the speed improvements, and to be polite I usually limit how many streams it takes up to one or two, but it's the UI improvements that I like. My most-used context menu option in Firefox is "DTA One-Click." Basically, if there's a link to a file, I can right click it, choose this option, and DTA automatically starts saving it to my desktop and then closes its self. There's a couple other nice little features too, but that's the main think I like.

It bugs me that I can't even find a bookmarks bar or download manager extension for Chrome. Hopefully someone will tackle that soon. Until then, I think I'm going to have to stay with Firefox.


ps- The other reason I'd love to use Chrome is so that I can start using HTML5 for Youtube.