Fran's Blog

I’ve started using Google Chrome. There, I said it. I’ve been dabbling with it a little at work, but this weekend, I decided to try it for a bit at home, see what it’s like. I have to say I like it a lot!

I, like a lot of web addicts out there am a Firefox user. I’ve loved Mozilla’s finest for a good few years now since version 0.5. But since version 3.0, it’s become a little clunky. The memory leaks (usually reaching 249MB, but going up to 1GB of memory at times), the UI staying more or less the same. When I use Safari on the Mac it feels slick and the Javascript runs like a…. very fast thing.

The speed of Chrome is the biggest good point, you feel like it is reacting quickly with little fuss. You know it has been built from the ground up. But there are some slick features which are barely worth noting, but extensions can be installed without restarting etc. The browser is a very important piece of software, so it should be slick and advanced, but without the bloat. This is the issue (among issues with standards) IE has, which lags behind the competition for speed now.

Chrome doesn’t have the full extensibility of Firefox yet, so Firefox will remain my browser of choice for dev at work. Now, I hope Firefox 3.6 or 4.0 will bare some of the good stuff and get slicker. Till then, Chrome, please stand up!