Why Google Chrome is Now My Favorite Browser
I’ve been running Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome simultaneously for more than two months and today I made the decision to choose only one of them as an active browser.
And Google Chrome is my pick. Here’s why…
Mozilla Firefox has been my favorite web browser for at least six years. When it comes to stability, there is no doubt about it. I might be one of the luckiest out there. During that period of time, Firefox had crashed less than ten times.
When I launched an instance of web browser software, most likely it will be for weeks. I never turned off my computer because I spent a lot — well, I admit, the majority of my time — in front of the computer.
During that time, I’ve chosen to install quite a few of extensions or add-ons. Here is a list of what I’ve loaded:
- AI Roboform. This add-ons allows me to save and populate not only passwords, but also any common web forms.
- All-in-One sidebar. Keeps everything in the main window and in the sidebar, including download manager, add-ons list, etc.
- ColorZilla. Picks any color of a pixel on the web browser window.
- FEBE. After a bit of customization, you don’t want to lose your settings. Performing a regular backup is a no-brainer with this.
- Greasemonkey. This add-on lets you install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. It provides extensions within the Firefox extension.
- Live HTTP Headers. Indispensable tool for many reasons, from grabbing URL for the streaming video to web server software optimization.
- MeasureIt. As the name implies, you can measure any kind of objects on the web browser window. It is useful for web designer and developer.
- S3 Firefox Organizer. Manages files in the Amazon S3 buckets.
- ScrapBook. Creates clippings or saves the whole web page.
- SearchStatus. A neat little extension that displays various web site data from Alexa, Google’s PageRank and Compete. It also contains shortcuts for various other web site services like whois.
- SEO for Firefox. Great for researching your competitors. This is off most of the time to speed up browsing though.
- SEO Toolbar. Provides ample of SEO-related information about current active page.
- Session Manager. Useful to save my browsing sessions, although it is also intended to rescue crashed browsing session, I rarely have the chance to use that feature.
- StumbleUpon. Used when I feel adventurous about discovering new web sites.
- TwitterBar. Lets me tweet about an active URL quickly. It also automates the URL shortening function.
- Web Developer. Can’t imagine living without it. Great for debugging CSS, among other things.
With those added features, I personally thought it would be hard to migrate to another browser but I was wrong — and am glad about it.
Out of those, a few features that I really missed are Roboform, Greasemonkey, and ScrapBook. The rest of them are either not highly necessary, will not be missed until I need it (FEBE, SEO for Firefox), or cause distractions (SearchStatus). I mean, who needs to know the Alexa rankings of every web site? I started to take a glimpse at the status bar out of curiosity.
No, I’m not getting rid of Firefox yet. I will still need it quite often to help me with research, web design and other things but for now Chrome is the default browser.
The fact that Chrome will support Greasemonkey will be another good reason for migration.
Another thing worth mentioning is the fact that each tab in Chrome is a separate process. That means if one instance crashes, you can simply kill it and proceed with your browsing session. After weeks of browsing, I found that I didn’t need to restart the browser just to claim back the wasted memory.
Firefox still doesn’t have a solution for this issue. I recall visiting a web page with scrolling ads — and kept it open for the whole day. With Live HTTP Headers, I finally found that the page requested new ads from a server every few seconds but before that the browser kept allocating more memory, from 800MB to more than 1GB. The browser crashed in the evening.
Although it happened only once, on a regular use, I still need to restart every so often. Using Chrome, this is not necessary at all.
With such new software, I’m surprised that Chrome is reliable enough for daily use. For the same reason, there are still a lot of rooms for improvement. For instance, I never experienced Flash plugin crashed for no reason in any browser except once in Chrome. I needed to reload the browser because all those tabs with Flash objects were affected from a single crash on one tab.
Finally, Chrome’s minimalistic design leaves more vertical space for browsing pleasure. Even the status bar appears and disappears as required. Combining search and address bar is also brilliant, although there should be a way to search beyond Google to specific sites and tools, such as WordTracker, Amazon, etc.
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The downside to chrome is that I keep running into websites that don’t support it. Some websites break in both firefox and chrome.
They have features like Form building and wysiwyg template designs for html formatted newsletters. Others have some scripts that fail to work in Chrome.
I eventually gave up on chrome becuase I was too regular a user of those websites. I use firefox because at least it works on all but one of the sites I reguarly use.
Hm… so far I didn’t find a lot of sites that refuse to run with Chrome.
I really like the minimalistic design of Chrome. It leaves a lot of room for the page.
Totally love Chrome.. I now have my gestures support via gMote and looking for a solution to clippings (I use for email signatures).
@Chris Chrome and Firefox support standards based websites. There’s no way as an industry professional that I would want to use templates or forms that aren’t at the very least cross browser compatible.
@all.. LOVE the extra vertical room!
Please can you point me in the direction of a HTTP Live header tool for Google Chrome, i’ve been looking everywhere for one.
Thanks
For the greasemonkey plugin chrome is actually able to run most user scripts without needing the plugin, I use lots of scripts from userscripts.org and also am using some home coded scripts. For HTTP live headers =( still searchin.