OK I better shouldn’t put myself in the browser war, but hey… maybe it leads to a discussion about favorite browsers and we might learn more about the current browser landscape. I am not an expert on browser comparison, and in this post I will focus on Chrome, which I really like!
Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 are very close to each other, both are awesome browsers. I liked Safari as well, especially for the Reader option (which I cover now with Readability). IE… I generally hate it, I have to give IE9 a chance but I do most on a Mac, so to be continued (see more towards the end of this post …)
Performance
First of all Chrome’s performance: when I have over 10 tabs open in Firefox it gets really slow, it even hangs.
Chrome feels fast, although tests say Firefox 5 is close or as fast as Chrome. Personally Chrome feels as one of the fastest browsers out there.
Tabs as individual processes
A tab can die by itself. Quite a cool feature: each tab has its dedicated memory. Chrome starts faster but consumes more memory. That is ok for me: at least I have a fast browser when having 20 tabs open. When a page goes slow, the issue is isolated to that tab, not the whole browser / program has to suffer. Neat. IE9 seems to have this feature as well.
Plugins 1 click, no restart
Plugins installations are 1 click and no restart of the browser is needed. When Chrome was just released the limited amount of plugins was a drawback, but that has changed. Now you have plugins for everything. I just installed Silver Bird for Twitter and ChromeItLater to save pages to Read it Later, both are working very well and only take up an icon of screen estate. The web developer toolbar and firebug have been ported so Chrome is web development compliant! Additionally you can “inspect” an element of the page when right-clicking upon selection.
For sure I will be firing up Firefox to debug websites. Pavlov reaction I guess.
Freaky stuff
Google’s Chrome has Pre DNS fetching (domain names get resolved before clicking on the link). Also it dynamically loads links before the completion of the URL in the address bar (like Google’s Instant search).
The integrated google search was annoying at first but now I really like it. Makes me much less dependent on bookmarks.
IE on Mac?
I haven’t played much with IE9, the dependence on Windows OS is an issue for me. So if somebody knows a good software to have it emulated on Mac, let me know. Of course I use Virtualbox from time to time but a non-virtual-os solution would be best. IEtester is Windows, and last time I tried IE on Mac through Wine was not a big success.
Chrome vs Firefox comparison
Further reading: Chrome vs Firefox
Continue the conversation …
You can subscribe to this blog, join my Facebook group, comment on this post below, or find me on twitter @bbelderbos