Switching to Chrome for a Week
June 20th, 2010 at 10:03 pm
I’ve been using my sweet Firefox for years. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But with Google’s Chrome supporting extensions and coming out of beta for Mac, it was time to try the competition. Plus, maybe it’s my computer(s) showing their age, but Firefox was just sometimes like an old man who couldn’t get out of bed!
I demand a lot from my web browser, with so many applications being online these days, not to mention I do web development so I live in my browser. The following is a review of and posted with Google Chrome after trying it as my sole* web browser for a week. It was tested mostly on Mac OS X, but I did some work on my XP machines as well.
*Almost, I opened Firefox to deal with unsupported stuff.
First off, Chrome is FAST. Fast to open, fast to remember tabs and close, fast to load pages. It just feels much snappier than Firefox. I was impressed right off the bat.
I quickly set up syncing of my bookmarks which was amazing but makes me realize I need to clean my bookmarks out! I have wanted something like that for a while – I hate having bookmarked something at work only to realize I need it at home. I’m sure there are other services out there for this, but it’s so convenient for it to go through my Google Account, which I use for pretty much everything!
Once I got used to not tabbing to the search bar after opening a new tab, I came to really like the integrated address/search bar. My Android-powered phone’s browser does this, so the paradigm is familiar. Most of the time I found that it was easy enough to differentiate suggested search terms, history items, and favorites from the drop-down menu when I began typing. I found I didn’t much miss selecting a search engine like in Firefox – I didn’t even bother setting up Chrome’s keywords for search engines, but probably would in the long run as even more of a time-saver.
Overall I really like how Chrome handles opening a new tab, dealing with recently closed tabs, and hinting from your history. It feels very smooth and easy to access, perhaps more than in Firefox.
I was very curious about Chrome’s philosophy of keeping different tabs in different process threads. Would this be better than Firefox, which would often choke on Flash or other intensive processes and take down all tabs and windows? My answer is yes – Flash did crash in Chrome a couple of times during the week and I was able to easily restart just that process with a simple click on a user-friendly error message. And all of my tabs and windows persisted, yay!
However, I will say that some pages and applications do damage to whatever browser you’re using. Chrome did get sluggish when multiple YouTube tabs were open, or if I had a few different AJAX-heavy pages doing processing at once, just as Firefox would. One difference in handling I saw was that in Chrome when lots was going on I would see a blank white screen for an instant when switching tabs, rather than the rendered page right away. In Firefox, I believe, you see the page right away but page controls may be disabled for a second instead as it changes gears (tabs). In general for performance issues I think I should mostly address my suggestions for improvement at Adobe rather than the browser teams, though!
Then there was the ease of installing extensions in Chrome. I don’t have to wait for it to save my tabs and restart in order to install something? This is great, I thought!
However, the extensions themselves sometimes leave something to be desired.
I love Adblock Plus for Firefox – thanks to it I’ve nearly forgotten that internet ads exist! However, the alternative for Chrome (simply titled AdBlock) just doesn’t catch as many ads out there. There’s also no handy toggle rendered into pages to add certain scripted elements to the block list, that must be done manually. I’m not thrilled.
I am also a heavy user of the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar (so much in fact, I forget that these features aren’t built in to every browser and get frustrated when using non-web-dev friends’ computers). So of course I installed the port of this extension for Chrome and at the end of the week have ended up somewhat disappointed. The interface for the Chrome version is perhaps a bit nicer and less intrusive by default, however, it’s missing a couple of features I’ve grown to love from the Firefox version, namely “View Generated Source” (which you can do natively with Chrome’s “Inspect Element”, but still), “Outline Custom Elements”, and a quick disabling of Javascript. Perhaps with some work this extension will be up to par, but I did find myself opening Firefox for some of these features during the week.
Staying with the web dev theme, I was annoyed at the omission of “View Selection Source” from Chrome’s right-click context menu. I use this all the time in Firefox. I had some troubles with the “Inspect Element” option in the context menu, which seemed to be something of an analog. Sometimes it would bring up that panel, but not have the current element selected. In that case it would have been just as easy to bring up the panel without use of this shortcut menu! I think Chrome’s developers believe they gave web developers a fuller set of tools in the form of the Developer Tools area (“Inspect Element” is part of this). However, when that’s not as easily accessible or navigable as Firefox add-ons written for a similar purpose, it just isn’t as efficient for the user. If I continue using Chrome I will give the Developer Tools more of a shot to make sure it’s not just the case of my learning curve getting in the way, but we’ll see how intuitive they are.
I’m not sure how this ended up to be the final thing on the list, but I must rant about things that are not supported in Chrome. First, Netflix Watch it Now won’t even attempt playing in Chrome, you just get a message about an unsupported browser. Okay, so maybe over time Netflix will support it, indeed, the Netflix player has gotten a lot better with support over the past few years. But the next two “unsupporteds” really grind my gears: Gmail offline access and Google Analytics. I’m shaking my head here because Google developed the browser! Sure, they have a million services, but don’t you think they’d go to the trouble to see that their applications work at least, if not work the best, in their own browser? Really, guys? Offline access just isn’t available for Chrome. In Google Analytics the list of accounts and the charts don’t render. These areas especially definitely need some more work!
In conclusion, will I be sticking with Chrome for another week or hightailing it back to Firefox? Well, it’s probably a bit of a mixed bag. I think I’ll stick with Chrome now to get more acquainted with some of the features I may be able to maximize, and because in general its performance seems better on this aging computer. When doing web dev I’ll probably keep both open all the time. For certain applications I have to use Firefox for now.
Something else that’s come out of this is also reflection on my own use of the browser. Do I really need so many tabs open at once all the time? Do I need my old session to respawn every time I quit and restart the browser? And geez, I need to organize my bookmarks!
Tags: chrome, firefox, technology
Word count: 1,283
Good review. Yes, there still are some unsupported sites. I found some ecommerce sites don’t work in Chrome. Same could be said for Safari.
For bookmarks, you might try delicious.com. You can choose to make some bookmarks private. There is a plugin for Firefox, not Chrome. Check out the Chrome plugin for Wolfram|Alpha.
Wolfram alpha looks really cool, I will play with it more! Thanks for the recommendations.