How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users

Firefox has long been the go-to web browser among power users for its impressive feature set, extensibility, and openness. But Google's nimble, light, also extensible and open browser, Chrome, has won over Firefox's core user base. Here's why:

Solving Unnoticed Problems

Chrome has fixed problems and made improvements to the browser experience many of us didn't recognize until Chrome fixed them. You can install and start using Chrome extensions without restarting your browser; Chrome isolates tabs into separate processes so if one tab crashes, your browser stays up; or one of the smallest of my favorites: When I close a tab, the remaining tabs don't resize until my mouse leaves the tab bar, meaning I don't have to worry about hitting moving targets. (Try it; it's pretty smart.)
Chrome's bringing a lot of creative new solutions to browsers from a user interface perspective (consolidating the search box and address bar seems so obvious), and they're good enough that Firefox somehow feels like it's playing catch-up on a lot of fronts, and switching between the two, Firefox can start to feel downright clunky. That's not to say Firefox isn't still innovating—for example, a clever new tabbed-browsing interface, called Firefox Panorama, is on its way in the upcoming Firefox 4 release. But Firefox's innovation can feel stale (and slow—see next point) when compared to Chrome.

Frequent, Incremental Updates

As of July, Chrome has accelerated their release cycle so that a shiny new version of Chrome's stable release is available every six weeks. The benefit to the user? Instead of waiting for a massive release to consolidate a laundry list of updates, new features end up in your browser as soon as they're ready, a few at a time. From a user-experience perspective, this is great. Your browser gets incrementally better, and rather than learning to use a laundry list of new features each time there's a major release, you can familiarize yourself with one or two new features at a time.
The upshot: You don't have to run the bleeding edge beta or developer releases to get new features shortly after they're developed.

Every few months, we pit the latest and greatest versions of the most popular web browsers against each other in a series of performance tests, and almost every time, Chrome comes out on top. Firefox has made leaps and bounds in speed over the past few years, and despite coming out on top in memory use in the last round of tests, Firefox has one very big problem: Firefox users think Firefox is growing progressively slower and more bloated, and at the end of the day, user perception is always more important than all the speed tests in the world.
I can attest to this: When I use Chrome, it feels faster, and that's all that matters. I'd attribute that feeling to more than just interface design (though I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome's sleeker design does color my perception, too). At the end of the day, I want the browser that's going to deliver web sites and information quickly and pain-free. The extensions and other niceties are just jelly; the browser needs to be fast and serviceable before the other stuff really matters. For users who want speed, functionality, and extensibility, Chrome is turning a lot of eyes from Firefox.

Browser Sync

Power users love things that sync. Synchronization means you can work from any computer and expect the same basic environment. Chrome started integrating sync into the browser about a year ago (not long after its first birthday), and as of June of this year, it had conquered the final frontier of browser syncing—extension syncing.
Yes, Mozilla has their own browser-syncing tool that they plan on integrating in future releases of Firefox, but it still doesn't do extension syncing, and word of its integration came some seven months after Chrome had started built-in sync.
(It's worth noting that a new Firefox extension, called Siphon, can sync extensions across Firefox installs. Also, other third-party tools offer better syncing functionality than either Chrome or Firefox—see Xmarks for bookmark sync and LastPass for password sync—but Chrome's still leading on these in-browser features while remaining lightweight.)

Integration with Google Services

If you're a big Google fan, Chrome has a lot to offer. First, it can sync all your browser data (see more below), and tie it all together with your Google account. If you're a Gmail user, Chrome got first access to drag-and-drop attachment uploads, drag and drop picture insertion, and drag and drop attachment downloads. If you're an Android user, the new Chrome to Phone app-plus-extension lets you instantly beam stuff from your browser to your Android device. Android2Cloud (not an official Google tool) pushes stuff from your phone back to your computer.
When Chrome OS comes out with a stable release, you'll be able to sync your full computing experience by just logging in with your Google account. It's not there yet, but it's all part of where Chrome is going.