I have no idea why but Firefox has been running like complete garbage on my PC lately. It’s always been a bit of a memory hog, even after 3.0 was released, but it’s gotten out of hand. Maybe it’s a combination of Vista and Firefox, who knows. Anyway, my friend Jon suggested that I download Google Chrome, and I decided to finally give it a shot.
I’ve been wanting to check it out for a while but when it comes to my browser I’m not much of an early adopter, I rely on it too much and don’t want to deal with any compatibility issues. That on its own is not such a big deal because I could’ve just installed it to play around with – the main reason I’ve been holding off is because of its lack of support for third-party plugins. I make heavy use of this feature in Firefox and at this point consider it a requirement. Two of my favourite plugins are Better Gmail 2 and All-in-One Gestures. The mouse gesture plugin is very intuitive and I’ve gotten so used to it that hitting the back button with my mouse or using keyboard shortcuts to open tabs seem so… unnecessary. Aside from those, I use several plugins extensively for development work including Firebug and Web Developer.
Anyway, lack of support for plugins aside, I downloaded and installed Chrome. First thing I noticed after starting it was that my RSS bookmarks were missing. I use Firefox’s built-in lightweight RSS reader to keep tabs on the feeds I subscribe to. Chrome apparently doesn’t have this feature, I assume because Google would prefer that everyone use Google Reader, and I find this pretty annoying.
Almost everything else is fine though, and the performance improvements are quite visible. No sluggishness, no memory hogging and no crashing and it’s been a week since I started using it. Lately, Firefox has also taken to still running in the background after I’ve shut it down, using ~250mb of RAM and for some inexplicable reason, about 80% of my CPU. Needless to say, this doesn’t happen with Chrome. I haven’t noticed an CSS or Javascript problems either, and aside from a small graphical issue one the WordPress login page for my blog, pretty much every site I’ve checked out renders properly in Chrome.
Firefox has been an excellent browser for a long time. It showed the world that IE wasn’t the only browser out there, and it provided a safe and pleasurable browsing alternative for a long time. I’m still going to use every now and then because I rely on some of its third-party plugins, but unless it becomes less bloated and inefficient, I’m going to keep transitioning to Chrome. If plugin support every arrives for this new browser, I think it might very well be the coup de grâce for Firefox.
