chrome

Over a year ago I said that Chrome was not compelling enough for me to adopt it as my main browser. Last December I decided to give it another go, and I haven't turned back since.

It's not very novel to blog about being a Chrome user these days, given it's success, but I'm continually nagged by seeing the old blog post title to set the record straight.

Stability was the compelling reason for me to switch, and stay switched. I often open a link in a new tab, and want to carry on reading a page I already have open while the new page loads. I grew frustrated by the frequency that Firefox freezes while the new tab loads, keeping me from doing anything in the browser.

Firefox is continually improving aspects of its stability, separation of processes, etc., but I'm already settled into the Chrome habit.

As an aside, I'm impressed with how few sites are crippled by using Chrome. It used to be that browing with anything other than crusty old IE meant coping with broken sites, and all too often giving in and popping IE open.

One thing I'm still lacking in Chrome is decent password management. I miss my Master Password, and the Master Password Timeout addon.

I gave Google's Chrome web browser another go, and after a bit less than a week I've gone back to FireFox. There are two reasons for this.

First, although Chrome might be faster when using Google's online apps, more stable since each tab is a separate process, etc., from a user experience point of view there is simply nothing compelling enough to make me _need_ to keep using Chrome. It isn't ten times better than the alternatives in any aspect of its use that I really notice on a regular basis. Firefox doesn't crash very often on me.

The second reason is plugins. Firefox has loads of plugins, which in effect means it has loads more functionality than is available in Chrome. In practice, there are probably only two or three plugins that I truly rely on. The first time I tried Chrome, shortly after it's release, I used it at work, and not for very long, because of FireFox's built in functionality for password management, and the password timeout plugin to enhance it. I use a lot of passwords when browsing at work, for the various online tools, test deployments of software, etc. I can't remember them all, but I don't want to just let Chrome remember them, and make them available to anyone who gains accesses to my PC. So I use a master password, and a timeout plugin that makes sure the master password is required fairly frequently.

This time around I used Chrome at home, and it turns out I don't rely on FireFox plugins quite as much in that context. However, last night I was surfing and ended up delving into a thread of links that seemed quite interesting for work, and wanted to save them to Delicious. I'm used to using a FireFox plugin for this, and realized I'm incapable of living without it. That was the end of Chrome for me, for this round anyway.

Chrome will probably add a plugin API, but we'll see whether it helps it become more than a me-too in the browser market. Firefox has won a 22% share of the market by doing compelling things that IE didn't do at first, and didn't do well when they finally added them (tabbed browsing and plugins). Chrome's intended killer features seem to be that it runs complex online apps faster and more stably. Unfortunately for Chrome, FireFox is not currently slow or crashy enough to make this a clear win for most users, but perhaps as the online applications become increasingly complex it will matter.