I love a lot of things about Firefox, including the extensions and the general slickness and innovativeness (is that a word?). But I have 2 problems with it:
- It takes forever to load.
- It's a huge memory hog.
I hadn't tried Google Chrome since it first came out a couple years ago, but after seeing Google actually running
commercials to promote it, I thought I would give it another try.
Chrome is a very slick piece of software, and it did solve problem number one -- it's very snappy to start up. The memory hog issue is not quite so clear cut -- Chrome does use less memory initially, but unlike Firefox it seems to use separate processes for separate tabs (or something), and after opening several tabs it starts to hog memory almost as badly as Firefox, if you add up the memory used by all the separate processes.
Chrome of course had a few items in which it didn't measure up to Firefox, although the principal downsides that I found in Chrome are really not in the program itself, but rather in the way it interacts with various complementary software that I use.
- My first issue is with ad blocking. Firefox has an awesome Adblock extension that keeps ads from loading. Chrome has a similar extension, but it doesn't work as well. I can't tell if Chrome's ad blocker allows the ads to load first before blocking them, or what exactly the problem is, but it's not as efficient in blocking the ads as Firefox's ad blocker.
- My second issue with Chrome (again it's not really with Chrome itself), is how it interacts with del.icio.us bookmarks. In Firefox, the keyword shortcuts for my bookmarks, which are created through del.icio.us, just work (for example, I can set it up so typing "fb" in the address bar will load Facebook.com). In Chrome, it's very odd, but the keyword shortcuts seem to work only some of the time. Sometimes they load the bookmark corresponding to the shortcut, and sometimes they don't do anything.
- The third problem that I have with Chrome actually is Chrome's "fault". The problem is with the saving of passwords. A lot of sites, after you log in successfully, will redirect you to a new page. Chrome doesn't handle that situation. Chrome pops up the "do you want to save your password" dialog as expected, but then the dialog disappears immediately after you log in, as soon as the page redirects, so you don't have time to save your password. And there's no way to enter a username and password into the password manager manually. Firefox handles this issue easily, by keeping the dialog open across multiple pages, until you either respond or the dialog times out.
- The fourth issue: Firefox's address bar is smarter than Chrome's. Firefox does a better job of predicting what I want after typing a few letters than Chrome does.
Conclusion: This is kind of a cop out conclusion, but I really like both Firefox and Chrome. I wish they would fix their little annoying issues, but overall they're both pretty impressive. I'm having trouble deciding which one I like better.
