Chrome

Google is generally the company who does things right. Features you want are there, or you’ll change what you want to match their features (hooray for gmail labels!) Things are organized cleanly and logically. Performance is generally pretty good, or some things like mail can be scaled down if you’re mobile or bandwidth handicapped. Their search has become the verb for searching. I’m not sure why its the best, or if the search part of google is all that great (lots of room for improvement IMO), but google is .. google.

When chrome came out, I tried it, and wasn’t too sure it was really even necessary in the browser market. It looked pretty similar to firefox, internet explorer with slight rearrangement. The performance could be better or worse but comparing half a second or a full second is hard for me to judge, especially when my internet connection could be attributed to any delay.

I switched back to firefox because of some features (plug-ins) that I found it hard to go without. FoxyTunes to control my music, and volume is fantastic. Greasemonkey lets me do some advanced script things on certain websites. FireFTP has become my ftp app of choice which is quite bizarre because firefox doesn’t really have anything to do with ftp. FireFTP is just an application inside of a browser I guess? It isn’t perfect but its there , and quick.

But here I am writing this blog on Chrome, so why did I abandon my old foxy browser? It was boggin me down. Too often firefox would take forever to close, or take forever to start up. Could this be due to my plugins? very likely. Also on some evil website with heavy multimedia or scripting usage, my firefox grinds to a halt and crashes too often.

What is google’s solution? Tabs are separate tasks, and don’t crash each other. Also, a few nice features I had in firefox, like a 9 panel multipage preview screen, is built in. The download manager I love in firefox (popup windows are so 2003) is built in chrome, and probably even better.

But the biggest thing is that Chrome is just better on my underpowered laptop, it doesn’t hog giants amount of memory to slow down my games on my desktop, its just less intrusive. I never have to scream “bah Chrome is acting up!” like i do with firefox. I never (not yet) have to go in task manager and kill chrome from doing whatever startup or shutdown crap its doing. So, all in all, I’ll have to find new way to use FTP (using a cygwin shell is more fun anyway) and also to control my music I’m starting to use the magic buttons on my keyboard more, or the taskbar miniversion of WMP11.

I hope some new features get added into chrome, I saw a sky blue browser and i want it painted black! (and some music control would be nice again…)