Matt Cutts recently wrote a nice piece listing the advantages of Google Chrome as a primary web browser. I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and I’m sold. Why?
- Chrome feels faster. There is less disk thrashing than when I use Firefox, especially when I leave the browser open for long periods. I also am a heavy user of Javascript/XMLHttpRequest applications, which run a lot faster with Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine.
- Keeping each tab in its own process means that I don’t lose my entire browser state due to a Flash hiccup. Firefox’s solution to restore tab state after crashes never worked well for me, since many of my open tabs are the result of POST and query requests which can’t be easily refetched. I have not yet have Chrome crash due to a core browser problem; it’s only due to Flash, and only twice so far.
- I don’t use bookmarks. I just type what I want in the URL bar, and whatever page I am looking for shows up quickly either due to URL history search or Google search. David Pogue of the NYT just publicized this “unknown” tip. Chrome has the best URL bar implementation I’ve seen.
- I like the spare layout. The download manager is less obtrusive than Firefox, with downloads appearing at the bottom of the current window instead of in a separate pane.
To deal with the loss of the AdBlock plugin, I switched to using Privoxy, which is a fast local proxy for stripping out excess images and scripts.
There are some tasks I will continue to use Firefox for, specifically the Web Developer plugin and Firebug. These two utilities combine to make the best web debugging environment I know of.
Tags: chrome · firefox · javascriptNo Comments
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.