# Goodbye Firefox, Hello Chrome



## Guest (May 12, 2010)

I've been increasingly frustrated with Firefox, both at work and at home, where it's been crashing like crazy and dragging more and more with every new release. I lost a huge document edit at work on Friday when it crashed and finally hit my wall of tolerance.

I downloaded Chrome and have been running it at work and at home as a test for the past weekend and the last two work days.

I like. Very much.

It's been super stable. Not a single crash despite doing all the same huge, online doc edits I was doing in Firefox in Chrome.

The speed is really quite amazing. It is faster rendering pages, no doubt about that.

I dig the very clean UI. I like minimal UIs that just feel intuitive and Chrome has done a nice job here. No secondary search text box, you just type the words in the all-purpose text entry box at the top of the screen. Very few buttons. Simple menus. Simple configuration.

I'm only running one extension at home: FlashBlock. At work I'm also running IE Tab (some of our SharePoint crap just demands IE to work correctly). I'm purposely keeping extensions to a minimum. I did so in Firefox as well. They aren't tested with the same rigour as the browser is and I know I've had bad extensions leaking memory in the past (Download Status Bar I'm looking at you here...) that have brought down my browser sessions.

The bookmark synchronization is nice. And it does synchronize, as advertised, between work and home and what not.

The tabs-on-top is a little weird. But it only took a day or so to get used to and it wasn't so bad.

The only think I pine for is a NoScript extension for it. I would really rather opt-in to JavaScript and what not on a per-site basis.

At home Chrome is running on my OS X machine, at work it's on both RHEL 5 and Windows XP boxes. Looks the same on all platforms. Feels fast on all platforms. I like that. Consistency is nice. The browser is probably my second most used app after a terminal window now. Crazy.

All in all I'm a new, happy Chrome user. It's now set as the default browser at work and home.


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

kinda funny you should mention that. i have been a loyal opera user since the beta stage. lately i have been getting pretty annoyed with the problems it is giving me, and have considered making F.F. my default browser. currently i use both. what stops me is certain features opera has that F.F. does not.


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## Guest (May 12, 2010)

cheezyridr said:


> kinda funny you should mention that. i have been a loyal opera user since the beta stage. lately i have been getting pretty annoyed with the problems it is giving me, and have considered making F.F. my default browser. currently i use both. what stops me is certain features opera has that F.F. does not.


Never been an Opera fan. It's a browser that's always come with too much feature bloat for me to look at it. 

What is it you like in Opera that Firefox (or Chrome) would be missing? I find most dissimilarities between browsers now are covered by third-party Extensions.

Really what I like about Chrome is no bloat. Very feature light. And I like that.


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## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

iaresee said:


> Never been an Opera fan. It's a browser that's always come with too much feature bloat for me to look at it.
> 
> What is it you like in Opera that Firefox (or Chrome) would be missing? I find most dissimilarities between browsers now are covered by third-party Extensions.
> 
> Really what I like about Chrome is no bloat. Very feature light. And I like that.


I was using Chrome for about 4 months maybe and switched back to FF recently. I got tired of having to re-load pages that didn't load properly. It seemed like 25% of pages either didn't load, timed out, or would say that the link couldn't be found upon initial load, but a quick F5 would load it up no-prob. Booo! 

Another thing that got to me after a while was some links not opening in a new tab with a middle click. This probably has more to do with the html on the page rather than Chrome's rendering of it, but this never happened to me with FF, so I switched back.

I liked Chrome a lot and will go back to it to try it out again in a couple months, but for now, I'm back to FF.


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## Guest (May 12, 2010)

hollowbody said:


> I was using Chrome for about 4 months maybe and switched back to FF recently. I got tired of having to re-load pages that didn't load properly. It seemed like 25% of pages either didn't load, timed out, or would say that the link couldn't be found upon initial load, but a quick F5 would load it up no-prob. Booo!


Interesting. I haven't hit that problem. Are you behind a corporate firewall?



> Another thing that got to me after a while was some links not opening in a new tab with a middle click. This probably has more to do with the html on the page rather than Chrome's rendering of it, but this never happened to me with FF, so I switched back.


Ah. Mac - so, what's a middle click?  I have all new pages set to open as tabs in the prefs and so far that's been obeyed 100%


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## Fader (Mar 10, 2009)

Firefox was running real sluggish so I switched to Chrome 2 months ago. I'm not going back.


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## zao_89 (Feb 17, 2006)

I stopped using FF after years for another browser, but not Chrome. Now I use Flock, apparently it was one of the two browsers (along with FF) that Netscape recommended it's users when they stopped making it. I love it because I can use all the extensions from FF (which was the main reason I didn't want to use any other browser) and it's got a nice RSS tool built in.


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## hollowbody (Jan 15, 2008)

iaresee said:


> Interesting. I haven't hit that problem. Are you behind a corporate firewall?
> 
> 
> Ah. Mac - so, what's a middle click?  I have all new pages set to open as tabs in the prefs and so far that's been obeyed 100%


No, this happens to me at work and at home. I'm pretty sure I have (had) the newest version, but I'll try uninstall and reinstall.

Middle click on a good ol' PC is open link in new tab.



Fader said:


> Firefox was running real sluggish so I switched to Chrome 2 months ago. I'm not going back.


Yeah, Chrome is definitely faster, but not fast enough to make me ignore the other problems I've had. Again, it might be a wonky install, or something, but I have the same issues on multiple computers. Maybe it's a Mac/PC thing??? Strange if it was.


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## cheezyridr (Jun 8, 2009)

iaresee said:


> Never been an Opera fan. It's a browser that's always come with too much feature bloat for me to look at it.
> 
> What is it you like in Opera that Firefox (or Chrome) would be missing? I find most dissimilarities between browsers now are covered by third-party Extensions.
> 
> Really what I like about Chrome is no bloat. Very feature light. And I like that.


with opera, i can zoom with the ctrl + mouse wheel, and the entire page zooms, not just the text. 
also, with F.F. you get images that auto load fit to width, and the option to click-zoom to original size. the pop-up/ad blocker is 1st rate. opera offers the wand feature, which i like, and has the guitar scales widget which F.F. does not have. i really like the speed dial alot too. the way it _operates_, i like better than any other browser.
but here lately, more and more pages do not fully load and i think it's some sort of flash conflict.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

I changed to Chrome awhile back for the same reasons as the OP. I have had a problem with it going back two pages instead of one on some sites. I haven't figured that out yet. It's so fast, I just hit the forward arrow again and the right page is back in less than a second.


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## AlcolmX (Oct 12, 2009)

Thanks for the Chrome tip. I was aware of it, but the thought of switching from Firefox (despite recent dissatisfaction and regular crashes) had not crossed my mind. Using it now, and so far so good.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

I am still on the search for the optimal browser. I am back using IE8 again. About the only thing I like about it is the tab functions. I was using FF for a bit and still do once in a while but it was having issues as well. IE8 has issues too. I think I tried Chrome very briefly but not long enough to properly evaluate it. Might have to give it a good go and see. 

On another note, the Windows 7 seems to have launched without too many issues and was a far better product and launch than the last one.


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## Guest (May 13, 2010)

cheezyridr said:


> with opera, i can zoom with the ctrl + mouse wheel, and the entire page zooms, not just the text.


Just tried that in Chrome: everything zooms. Not just the text.



> also, with F.F. you get images that auto load fit to width, and the option to click-zoom to original size.


All browsers do this now, right?



> the pop-up/ad blocker is 1st rate. opera offers the wand feature


FF and Chrome have password managers -- what's different about Opera's Wand feature?



> which i like, and has the guitar scales widget which F.F. does not have.





> i really like the speed dial alot too.


Chrome has a speed dial like think by default and FF has a plugin. 



> the way it _operates_, i like better than any other browser.


That's a key thing for sure. I just got so used to FF myself.
but here lately, more and more pages do not fully load and i think it's some sort of flash conflict.[/QUOTE]


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## keeperofthegood (Apr 30, 2008)

I have used FireFox as my primary browser since 0.2.1.0 I believe the version code was.

Since the newest engine has come out, yes page load fails are at an all time high. One thing that helped was doubling my pagefile size. Yes, FF uses pagefiles.

What I would like to do wtihout is ajax. I can deal with Flash for the 'most' part. Some pages like megavideo if I am not ON that page when the player loads, the player waits until I am there to load, and if I wait too long the player times out. Some sites are just bad such as myspace. Many of the flash objects there make the tab stick, even closing the tab is next to impossible, so much so that I simply do not go onto myspace any more WAY too much of a pain. However, the largest bulk of web page issues are with ajax, which is a four letter word in my books. Google has embraced ajax the way a sailor embrasses a prostitute, and as a result MUCH of anything by Google is wonky at the least. Not only is it wonky, it spawns non-human readable URLs to a degree that you cannot surf with any sort of confidence that what you click is where you are going. Also all those /# type URLs are not openable in tabs, REALLY puts a damper on using sites that cannot be opened in tabs.

For now I am using another Mozilla product. Seamonkey. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 SeaMonkey/2.0.4 - Build ID: 20100317120533 Yes it also has some of the failed page loads that Firefox has, to a much smaller degree though. It has some really annoying features like no separate search entry the URL and Search entry are shared and BOY does that get tired fast. In the latest releases of Seamonkey there is no longer a fav's toolbar which I miss. And unlike Firefox, Seamonkey does not remember resized pages. However, all this I can life with


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

GuitarsCanada said:


> On another note, the Windows 7 seems to have launched without too many issues and was a far better product and launch than the last one.


That is for darned sure. I never had vista but a few of my business partners and associates did and let's just say they were less than happy.


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## Powdered Toast Man (Apr 6, 2006)

I decided to give Chrome a go after seeing this thread, and my father-in-law has been raving about Chrome. 

My initial impressions are that the interface is odd, and the menus are difficult to make sense of. I also dislike the bookmarks layout. I found Chrome also has issues with certain Java and Flash elements as well. While viewing a flash based video, I went full screen and none of the on-screen controls worked while in that mode. Also found when browsing Kijiji, that Chrome had trouble when I clicked on the other photos while viewing an ad. 

Result? I've gone back to FF. I just updated to the latest version and hopefully they've resolved a few recent bugs. Also decided to go app shopping and installed AdBlock Plus - which I'm finding to be excellent. ColourTabs is also nice. Chrome has potential, but it doesn't yet feel "finished" to me. Needs further development.


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## Diablo (Dec 20, 2007)

FlipFlopFly said:


> That is for darned sure. I never had vista but a few of my business partners and associates did and let's just say they were less than happy.


I think Vista got a bad rap. Using it right now on one of my cheaper laptops that came with it. If not for some driver incompatibility issues I'd be fine with it. Not to say that its an improvement over XP either though.


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