1. I really dislike the firefox omnibar and that I can't set it to just be an address bar. I sometimes visit washingtonpost.com but not often enough that I have a bookmark, and every time firefox insists it should be wasingtonpost.com.co, which I must have visited at some point but it is not bookmarked and the suggestion never goes away (I have firefox set to clear history when exiting, but I tried to do a "clear now" and it still appears). This means I can't type washingtonpost.com and go to washingtonpost.com, which is all I really want from typing in an address bar.
3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.
5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.
I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.
That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".
1. Try to type wasingtonpost.com.co and press delete (more generally - hover the mouse over a url-suggestion and pressing the "delete" button will remove it from history.
Very strange that clearing the history doesn't resolve it though..
I tried that on each character where it shows that completion after seeing your initial suggestion, but it didn't help (it makes the suggestion go away that time, but it is shown again next time). I finally figured out that I had bookmarked a scam page under washingtonpost.com.co at one point and deleting that made it stop (I looked before but must have typoed the address). The confusing part is that it didn't complete to the full bookmarked page and didn't show the star like it does for everything else. And I did have the home page of the Washington Post bookmarked, just not in an accessible place to click on it, so I don't know why it didn't choose to autocomplete to that.
Also, I found browser.urlbar.autoFill that gets it to not modify what I type but still show suggestions from bookmarks. I think I had tried to disable browser.urlbar.autocomplete.enabled at some point and enabled it again since it is sometimes helpful to quickly find bookmarked pages. It still searches if the entered text doesn't look like a domain name or url and there seems to be no way to disable that. Still, I appreciate that Firefox is configurable in a lot of ways and that there is a way to get it to mostly do what I want :).
regarding your first point, I believe you can make the address bar behave like you want simply by Edit->Preferences->Uncheck 'Provide Search Suggestions' and removing a result from your address bar results with shift-delete might also be what you're missing
Thanks for the suggestions. Unchecking 'Provide Search Suggestions' didn't help and I already had 'Show search suggestions in address bar results' unchecked. Shift-delete didn't help either. I made a somewhat longer reply to the sibbling comment of your comment but it turned out I did have a sub-page of washingtonpost.com.co bookmarked and for some reason it was just completing to the domain name and not showing the star. Deleting that fixed the problem. I also found browser.urlbar.autoFill to make it stop changing what I type. So yay firefox configurability.
3. userChrome.css is poorly documented but a nice option, not sure if Chrome has something similar. I have firefox set so that each tab is just a favicon and an extra pixel on each side. It mostly works well, except at some point the audio icon started appearing (it didn't when I first made the change) and it appears over the next tab, that makes it impossible or nearly impossible to directly select the next tab.
5. Reader mode is exellent if you use a more comprehensive javascript blocker, since many pages work in reader mode that wouldn't otherwise. Hopefully this isn't because it is actually running some javascript in reader mode or otherwise avoiding the usual blocking rules.
I think the reason there is a focus on "firefox is better than crome in some fundamental ways" is that once you get down to individual features they both change frequently and a feature that one person likes might really annoy someone else. The reasons to avoid chrome are not likely to change unless firefox gets as bad as chrome. If you convince someone to switch for some random feature then there is a much better chance they will switch back in a few releases when the random feature breaks in some way. Additionally, it isn't clear that firefox has an opportunity to convince all that many end users.
That being said, anyone who wants to do a feature comparison should go ahead and do it. The article seems to be saying "the real problem here is that other people are writing about the differences they care about".