I've been using
Firefox since it was a wee 1.x product. It has served me well, but in the past couple of years I've noticed that under heavy load (15+ tabs / 20+ extensions active), it really bogs down and memory consumption becomes an issue. I understand that some of this is due to my usage patterns and poorly written extensions, but I'm not the only one complaining about it. Sure, there are a lot of advanced tweaks to help remedy the situation, though I have come to really appreciate software that you don't
have to tweak on a continual basis.
I develop websites for a living, so it's in my best interest to keep up on browsers. I have a MacBook Pro and use Safari from time to time. It's a solid browser, but I don't find myself going back to it habitually. Same with Opera; it's cool, but I didn't see a major need to change my go-to browser.
That said, I've been using
Google Chrome since the first preview releases came out. Central to the things I like about Chrome are its sandbox architecture, spawning a new child process for each tab in play. As a result, Chrome does a really good job of keeping a tab gone awry from hijacking the entire browser. On top of that, my experience is that JavaScript heavy (e.g. Web 2.0) sites, say
Remember The Milk, perform noticeably faster in Chrome.
I live for the
myriad extensions available from 3rd party developers in Firefox. One thing I didn't like about Chrome early on was its lack of extensibility in this regard. This, however, has been remedied in more recent builds of Chrome. I'm excited to finally see the
Chrome extension community is really taking hold. Almost all the major extensions that I consider absolutely crucial are now available for Chrome.
Checking my stats, 49% of gtvault.com users prefer using Firefox, to only 39% using Internet Explorer. I can't say how happy I am that GTVault users are ahead of the
worldwide alternative browser adoption curve. Chrome comes in at 5%, and for being such a young browser, that's pretty promising, although that's considerably behind the worldwide trend of 8% (which our Firefox usage partially makes up for!). I still have Firefox open and use it all the time, as the breadth and depth of its extension community is without compare. Regardless, I find myself using Chrome more and more for daily surfing.
So, who out there is using Chrome? If so, do you like it? If not, you should really give it a try!
