What are some things that you can do in Firefox but not in Chrome?

icebraining · on Sept 27, 2012

Chrome extensions have a fairly limited API that lets you do some pre-approved things using an HTML/CSS UI.

Firefox, on the other hand, provides full access to its internal modules; a lot of the browser itself is built on JavaScript and XUL (the UI language) and extensions are essentially on equal footing in that regard: they can extend and even replace a lot of the browser.

A good example is sqlite-manager, which is essentially a simple but full-blown database manager which can read and edit SQLite databases, since it has filesystem access.

There's also the oldish Chatzilla, which can connect directly to IRC servers (a Chrome extension can only connect to HTTP or websocket servers). And It's All Text! which can launch a local text editor to edit a textarea field.