Google Chrome
As a committed Firefox fan of many years, the launch of Google Chrome only registered as a small blip on my tech radar. I always like to see competition (who wants to see the stagnation of the IE6 years again) and another browser was fine by me, though I couldn’t really get excited about it.
However, soon after the (highly anticipated) release of Firefox 3.5, I started to get a number of annoying problems (mainly crashes and slowdowns) both on my work and home PCs. For the first time ever Firefox was beginning to annoy me... so I decided to install Chrome and give it a whirl.
It was not quite love at first sight (mainly because it takes a bit of getting used to the uncluttered screen and combined URL/Search bar) but my god was it fast!! I quickly updated to the beta channel (to provide cross pc bookmark synchronisation) and then to the cutting edge developer version (which improved the speed even more and provided for basic extension support). I was hooked!
There are a few things I still prefer about Firefox – mainly the sheer number of extensions, but Chrome is quickly catching up in functionality. Once the extensions support filters down to the stable version and developers start writing them then I will be a complete Chrome convert! I still find some sites that don’t render properly in Chrome, but these are a rarity, and the idea of having a separate box for search and URL now seems very old fashioned. I’m still hoping that the next versions of Firefox include some speed improvements, but until then Chrome is my default.
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