the tindog coffeehouse

This is me eating my words.

After stating my preference for Firefox and saying that Google’s Chrome browser “doesn’t really feel complete”, I’m ready to admit I was wrong. In fact, I would even go so far as to say I love it. As much as a person can love a web browser anyway.

The migration from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t planned and it wasn’t really a voluntary move. Firefox forced me out after multiple add-ons started giving me problems on two different computers. I could disable one or two and be fine for a while, but eventually it would crash again or freeze up or just refuse to open in the first place.  The more problems I encountered, the clearer my decision became: I had to move on. And no, I don’t fully blame Mozilla; after all, these were third-party add-ons. But after several days of troubleshooting, it simply was no longer worth the effort.

My main hang-ups with Chrome in the past were the bare-minimum interface and the limited ability to personalize it (as compared to Firefox). I just didn’t see how I could function as efficiently on Chrome — with it’s single “omnibox” address bar — as I could on Firefox, which includes an address bar, small search box, and the ability to add other useful toolbars. But once I figured out how to create custom search engines and keywords, I realized it could work just as well as what I had been using. And most of the problems I had had with early third-party extensions seemed to be resolved with more recent versions.

Not that Chrome is perfect. I’d still like more customization options, and a few websites don’t quite work as expected. Moving items in your Netflix queue, for example, is next to impossible in Chrome. But for the most part, it does the job very well. And it is noticeably faster than Firefox, which is certainly a plus.

Of course, Firefox 4 is due out in the next few months, so I suppose there’s always the possibility I could go back. At this point, though, it doesn’t seem likely.

Previously:
With web browsers, sometimes less is less
Even with extensions, Google Chrome needs polishing
Giving in to Google