Wed, 10 Feb 2010

Switch from Firefox to Chrome

I whine a lot about Firefox and it continues not to improve at a satisfactory rate, so I decided to have a look at Chrome. My first few experiments showed me that it was far from ready for prime time on either OS X or Linux, but various people encouraged me to try the developer version instead of the regular one and so I gave that a fly last weekend.

And then I announced three days ago on Twitter that I was switching to Chrome on both OS X and Linux. So far, so good. There are things I don’t particularly like, some of which might change for the better and others of which I’ll obviously have to learn to live with. But, for the most part, I like it better than Firefox. It seems quite a bit faster. And, although it consumes a lot of system resources, it seems to leave me with a system that still allows me to do other things. So far, it hasn’t crashed.

Some elements of its handling of tabs please me a lot, other elements not so much. It did a good job of importing my Firefox settings, although it insisted that I had to shut down Firefox before it would do the import. Under Linux, it seems to have trouble getting access to the sound system, although many Youtube videos are better silent.

The Linux instance I have running has been going for three days. It is using a bit over 2GB of memory—which I think is rather a lot, but I can live with it on my main machine. It has 45 processes. I have 7 windows and 68 tabs open—light use for me, but I’m not doing much with it at this time of the year.

Under OS X, it’s much less busy as I just fire it up when I need it and never leave it running for long—the machine is a laptop which is only used when I’m away from home.

The verdict after three days: I’ll keep using it for a while until it either does something dreadful or fails to do something that I really want. It would be really nice to be able to stop whining constantly about my browser.

Posted at: 16:01

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