Recently in Firebug Category

Every once in a while I do a couple hours of my Web-intensive work in Internet Explorer on the aging Windows box the company provides for me.

It's running IE 8 with XP, and let me tell you, IE 8 is a slow, surly dog. I remember IE 6 being much quicker, but you could shove an icepick into your own eye waiting for a new tab to open in IE 8.

Since I code for the Web and we have a huge IE user base, I do need to use IE more than you'd think. One thing MS did do was add some developer tools to the browser in version 8. While it's a bit clunky and more than a bit slow on my 3 GHz Celeron/512 MB RAM Dell box, you can actually make changes to the HTML and CSS on pages with the development tool a la Firebug and Web Developer in Firefox.

For raw speed, Firefox and Opera have IE on the ropes. What about Google Chrome? It doesn't take long on this box before I can barely get a screen to refresh between tabs without wondering if the ghost of IEs present has taken it over.

Without FF, the world would be a much more annoying place.

Even though I do a lot of work in Firefox, where Chris Pedrick's excellent Web Developer add-on helps me code, whenever I'm doing "casual browsing," working in Movable Type, Google Docs, Gmail or any of the various Web-based programs I rely on that allow it, I use the Google Chrome browser.

Why? Speed.

Even though I think a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM is adequate for Windows XP, there's no denying that Chrome is faster to load and run than Firefox (and Firefox leaves Internet Explorer 7 way back in the dust). Chrome is right up there with the Opera browser when it comes to speed, but already Chrome does better in terms of rendering pages.

And basically Google Chrome is a nice, lean, uncomplicated browser.

I made it my default browser because every time I click on a link in an e-mail (usually in Thunderbird, by the way), the machine would open that link in Firefox. And on this box, while I am using Firefox for development, I'm happier doing the rest of my browsing in Chrome.

I haven't yet had the opportunity to run Firefox 3.1, which is supposed to be much faster than 3.0.x.

So what if Chrome had a tool like Web Developer? And what if Chrome ran (and ran well) in non-Windows environments (Linux, BSDs, Mac OS)? Just more world domination for Google (and a faster box for me).

Web Developer or Firebug?: I should probably try to familiarize myself with the Firebug extension for Firefox. Having more than one tool to help with Web development (and I need all the help I can get), isn't a bad thing. I guess I use Web Developer because it was the first of the two that I was able to get working the way I needed it.

Related:

Google Chrome: What does it offer developers?
Chromium Developer Documentation