Undiscovered Click — Google Chrome: The honeymoon is over, I'm back with Firefox

Here's an entry that never got published for one reason or other. It was originally written May 8, 2009:

I made a big deal out of how great I thought the Google Chrome browser was when it first came out. It was so fast, blah, blah, blah ...

Well, until today I hadn't clicked the Google Chrome icon in my Windows XP dock in maybe six months, maybe longer.

After using it for awhile, I found Google Chrome to be less than stable. It would often just halt in mid-task. Screens could be slow to redraw.

And while I liked the development tools that come built into Chrome, there are better tools in Firefox (principally the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons).

But the tools didn't matter so much as my impression of Chrome's speed and stability. It could start out fast, but things would inevitably grind down after the browser was running awhile. I have nothing tangible to base this on, just that Chrome was not working well on my particular box.

So after fighting it for awhile, I just started using Firefox again.

Firefox, especially version 3 (3.0.10 for today anyway), is extremely solid. And I can work longer on this XP box without everything going to hell.

Of course I still have a single task — just one thing, but one critical thing — that requires IE but for some reason lets me use the Opera browser. You don't know pain unless you need to run IE on a regular basis. I spent the morning on a computer (not mine) with nothing but IE. You'd thing that Windows XP with 2 GHz of CPU and 512 MB of RAM could run a Web browser, no problem.

But there was a problem. Sludgy slowness.

Anyhow, all I really wanted to say was that I threw over Firefox for Chrome, but once the shine wore off, I went back to Firefox and have been quite happy to split my time between FF and Opera.

Oh, and on my Unix/Linux machines, I'm also using Firefox (and Opera). No Chrome for those yet. I know Google keeps promising a Linux port of Chrome. I doubt that there will be native builds for OpenBSD and FreeBSD, but I've been wrong before (many, many times) and could be again.

Meanwhile, Firefox runs on just about everything. I can't run FF in 32-bit SPARC OpenBSD, but I can run it (barely, but it'll run) in Solaris 9 for 32-bit SPARC.

But for my i386 (Windows, Linux, OpenBSD) and PowerPC (Linux and OS X) hardware, at least there's a browser that works consistently across all of these architectures and operating environments.