Google Chrome

[Steve of Bloomington]

I liked the comic, actually I said 'so what' about Chrome until I read the comic, but I'm a comic and software development nerd, so it was practically drawn for me.

Since I am mostly using the Mac even at work now (running reviled Win in a VM), I haven't yet messed with Chrome but will check it out this week.

[buffcoat]

Helios Creed always made me think... wait, wrong Chrome.

I like it, particularly on my laptop and particularly for this site, where I may have 15 windows open at once.  No crashing, no slowdowns.  Good stuff.

[Martin]

Getting more and more frustrated with how Firefox is just hogging all my CPU these days... and so I'm trying out Chrome again, for the second time. The first time it was just a beta, I think, and wasn't working all that well. Now it imported all the Firefox settings, bookmarks, and passwords, and... so far, so good. It's certainly fast. I'm guessing where it can fail is with the extensions - which make Firefox so great.

[JustNicole]

I want to change my name to Mrs. Google Chrome because I love it so much. I love that you have the tab button in the browser and can still open up tabs from the keyboard. I set my homepage to their thumbnail view option and it just makes everything so much easier. I also like their options of backgrounds. I chose the Sigerson Morrison one.

My only two problems so far is the the history has not been as easy for me to use as Safari's and the bookmarks aren't as easy to change over. In fact, adding bookmarks and folders to the bookmark bar has been the biggest issue I've had with it but that's only because Ghrome has made it so much easier for me to find stuff I like.

[Christina]

Helios Creed always made me think... wait, wrong Chrome.

I like it, particularly on my laptop and particularly for this site, where I may have 15 windows open at once.  No crashing, no slowdowns.  Good stuff.

hm. I may need to think about using this ... I accepted the crashiness of Mozilla a long time ago b/c I liked the flexibility of it. I don't use hardly any of the add ons any more besides XMarks. Is there any other way to have a central list of your bookmarks for work and home computers? you know, that y'alls like and use a lot?

[Gilly]

I need mouse gestures, universal webpage zoom and greasemonkey (one that isn't a pain in the butt) before I would even consider switching from Firefox. I'm really disappointed with Chrome, it has been out over a year now and not much has changed. It's fast but of course a barebones browser is going to be faster than an all purpose one.

[Steve of Bloomington]

Is there anything in the neighborhood of GreaseMonkey for Chrome? I thought Chrome was all about the Javascript.

[Gilly]

You can actually use Greasemonkey with chrome, you just save the extensions to a folder inside your Chrome folder. But, not everything works and some things don't work right. When I tried Chrome out, it worked most of the time for me. It's just not a simple one click process like Firefox, and managing outdated scripts would be a pain in the butt.

[Steve of Bloomington]

Thanks, I will give it a shot. I dabble in the GreaseMonkey stuff.

[yesno]

* Safari is just as fast as Chrome now, as far as I can tell.  The main competition between them is the javascript engine. They use the same rendering technology (WebKit), which is much better than Firefox's Gecko.  Everyone is abandoning Gecko.  For example, Gnome's Epiphany is now WebKit-based.  Whatever the best browser is, it's going to use WebKit.

* Because of its non-native UI, Firefox is ugly and behaves differently than other applications.  Because it is based on Gecko, it is slow and not as standards-compliant as the competition.  I keep it around for weird extensions (Download Them All, etc), but I don't need it for day-to-day browsing.  The only extensions I need/use every day are 1Password, XMarks, Click to flash, and Ad Block, all on Safari.  (1Password, by the way, is the best software I purchased in 2009. I ignored numerous recommendations for it for a really long time.)

* It is possible to have more than one application installed on a single computer.

* These aren't browser specific, but I use the Printliminator, Readability, and Read Later/Instapaper bookmarklets every day.

[Gilly]

Is Safari for Windows as good as it is on Mac? Can it do Greasemonkey and mouse gestures?

[yesno]

Is Safari for Windows as good as it is on Mac? Can it do Greasemonkey and mouse gestures?

Maybe it's as fast, but I don't think it's extensible at all.  I don't know why Apple even bothers with it--it made sense for a while to help web developers, but now there are other people with WebKit browsers.