I’ve been a long time Firefox user (I’m talking when Mozilla wasn’t even called Firefox, heck I even used Netscape Navigator), and I’ve loved Firefox since the day I’ve used it. It has always been innovative, fast, and better with standards. IE still doesn’t compare to what Firefox is. Their incorporation of add-ons alone was a huge stepping stone in the development of browsers; however, as of late I’ve started to notice Firefox slipping away into a bloated mess.
You see, in the beginning Firefox was the speediest of them all. Quick loading times, quick start times, the works, but as it has developed the infamous ‘memory issue’ has grown worse and worse. They started out with the right idea: offer an alternative to the slow, buggy mess that is Internet Explorer all while being quick and efficient; but now they’ve turned into what they were set to destroy.
In my general love of testing out new software, I came across Google Chrome about a year ago (give or take a few months). At first, it had some promise, but without extensions and with its instability, I couldn’t justify replacing Firefox solely on the terms of speed.
I recently decided to give Chrome another test-run, and I must say, it’s exactly what I was looking for in Firefox all those years ago. It’s quick, innovative, and offers all the features that you’ll find in Firefox, with much better optimization. The application has gotten much more stable, and they’ve even compensated for any rare instability by running each tab as a separate process, so when one hangs you simply kill that process and not the entire browser. The extensions are fantastic and themes are easily applied. Not to mention, it doesn’t look half bad either.
I’ve noticed that the Linux version is a bit less stable for me, and whether that be the fault of Linux Mint KDE or Google Chrome I haven’t quite determined, but I’m sure with future releases stability will improve so I can use my new beloved browser without issue.
One can even hope that it comes out of beta sometime this decade, though looking at Gmail as an example of a Google product… that may not be so likely.
Google Chrome is indeed what Firefox set out to be, and it has come to be my new browser of choice, if you haven’t tried it yet head over to http://google.com/chrome and give it a try.
-Mike
