Firefox, I Just Can't Quit You

I am the last guy in my office still using Firefox. My team is always asking me why I am stuck on it, so I thought I'd finally commit it to a blog post so I don't have to explain each time someone looks over my shoulder.

Tree Style Tabs

I open a lot of tabs. I am sure many Hacker News users are the same way. My work flow is to open things that look interesting in HN or Google Reader, and later on I will read longer pages when I have time to get absorbed in them.

Using more than a half dozen tabs in any browser gets hard. The title of the page is no longer visible and you're left with a thin sliver of favicons across your top bar. More over, if I have several windows related to the same project, it's hard to switch between them unless I keep them tightly ordered together.

Tree Style Tabs fixes both of these problems. All of your tabs are laid out as a hierarchical tree, docked to the side of your browser. Anytime you open a link in a new tab, it shows up as a child of the page you opened it from. All of these children can be easily collapsed. If several pages are related to a project you're working on, you can drag and drop them together in the tab docking area.

Chrome has several plugins that try to do this, but they do not have dockable panes as part of their extensibility model. This totally negates the at a glance benefit you get from Tree Style Tabs in Firefox.

AJAX in Firebug

Debugging AJAX calls in Chrome can be a pain. First off, AJAX calls don't show up in the Console tab of Chrome Developer Tools unless you check a special setting. Once you get them showing up, it shows you a call stack for the call. Seems nice, but 9 times out of 10 this is not the problem with an AJAX call. It's usually something wrong with the POST data or the response. So now I have an extra click on the URL to see post data. The query string or post data isn't in its own tab, but instead mixed in with the headers; which makes sense but 99% of the time headers are a distraction.

In Firebug, AJAX calls show up as interactive rows in the console. In a single click I can see what was posted and easily flip over to see the JSON response as a tree.

All the same things are possible, but it's just a lot more straight forward in Firefox.

Please Let Me Be Wrong

Know of a good tab extension for Chrome that I can use? Is there a way to configure Developer Tools to be more streamlined? Tell me in the comments.

I'd love to be wrong on this so I can finally switch over. In the meantime, I guess I am the browser compatibility tester on my team :)

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