Review by bonejob
(4 months ago, using version 0.0.0.0)
Features:
Performance:
Interface:
Price:
It is very fast - faster than my extension-beladen installation of Firefox
3.5 - but nevertheless a little slower than bare-bones Firefox 3.5. That of
course is the trade-off. A lot of the features that I have become accustomed to
in Firefox through my various extensions are conspicuously absent.
As for the interface, I am gradually warming to it, but unlike Firefox, it is
not very customizable, so if I don't like it, that's just tough.
Some features I like that are unique: the Task Manager, that allows you to
see all the browser-related processes that are running and enables you to shut
them down individually; the display on new tab windows the thumbnails of most
visited pages, a list of recently bookmarked pages, and a list of most recently
closed pages, in case one wants to reload them; and most to my liking, the
ability to call up an "incognito" window, for browsing without leaving
a history behind. The display of past visited and/or shut down pages can be
added to Firefox through the Tab Mix Plus extension, though, but instead of
having to open a new tab to see them, one can simply call them up by a
right-click context menu - a more efficient and user-friendly implementation as
far as I am concerned. As for the "incognito" feature, Firefox offers
- new in version 3.5 - the ability to erase history by hour or by day, and an
extension enables true anonymizing, the ability to browse through an untraceable
IP proxy.
One area where Chrome seems noticeably superior to Firefox is in stability.
I've never experienced a crash or a freeze using Chrome. A bare-bones install of
basic Firefox is reasonably stable. But all of its extensibility comes with the
price of lessened stability. Anybody and everybody submits extensions and some
really do cause more crashes and freezes. Read the user reviews, but basically,
it's the wild west - caveat emptor.
Am I switching to Chrome? Nope! Not yet! I use it sometimes when I want to do
some immediate fast-and-dirty browsing, or when I want fast access to Gmail, but
I still like the customization features of Firefox, and on a more philosophical
level, I want to support open source software as much as possible. Chrome is
based on an open source engine, but is itself proprietary to Google.
Lastly, I use Linux quite a bit and while there is an excellent Firefox for
Linux (superior to the Windows version IMHO), Chromium, a Linux version by
Google based on the same engine, is still not ready for prime time. I really
like being able to go from the Windows world to the Linux world and have a
similar browsing environment in each.
In short, it would take an awful lot to get me to switch; Chrome/Chromium
will have to evolve a lot more and/or the Mozilla team behind Firefox will have
start sleeping at the switch, letting Firefox fall technologically behind, in
order to move me back to a proprietary product. Firefox's latest 3.5 release,
with a much smaller memory footprint, lower CPU load, and much faster rendering
times than previous versions, plus the addition of some neat new features and
judicious refinements of old ones, shows no evidence that Mozilla intends to be
caught sleeping any time soon.
Review by bonejob (4 months ago, using version 0.0.0.0)
It is very fast - faster than my extension-beladen installation of Firefox 3.5 - but nevertheless a little slower than bare-bones Firefox 3.5. That of course is the trade-off. A lot of the features that I have become accustomed to in Firefox through my various extensions are conspicuously absent.
As for the interface, I am gradually warming to it, but unlike Firefox, it is not very customizable, so if I don't like it, that's just tough.
Some features I like that are unique: the Task Manager, that allows you to see all the browser-related processes that are running and enables you to shut them down individually; the display on new tab windows the thumbnails of most visited pages, a list of recently bookmarked pages, and a list of most recently closed pages, in case one wants to reload them; and most to my liking, the ability to call up an "incognito" window, for browsing without leaving a history behind. The display of past visited and/or shut down pages can be added to Firefox through the Tab Mix Plus extension, though, but instead of having to open a new tab to see them, one can simply call them up by a right-click context menu - a more efficient and user-friendly implementation as far as I am concerned. As for the "incognito" feature, Firefox offers - new in version 3.5 - the ability to erase history by hour or by day, and an extension enables true anonymizing, the ability to browse through an untraceable IP proxy.
One area where Chrome seems noticeably superior to Firefox is in stability. I've never experienced a crash or a freeze using Chrome. A bare-bones install of basic Firefox is reasonably stable. But all of its extensibility comes with the price of lessened stability. Anybody and everybody submits extensions and some really do cause more crashes and freezes. Read the user reviews, but basically, it's the wild west - caveat emptor.
Am I switching to Chrome? Nope! Not yet! I use it sometimes when I want to do some immediate fast-and-dirty browsing, or when I want fast access to Gmail, but I still like the customization features of Firefox, and on a more philosophical level, I want to support open source software as much as possible. Chrome is based on an open source engine, but is itself proprietary to Google.
Lastly, I use Linux quite a bit and while there is an excellent Firefox for Linux (superior to the Windows version IMHO), Chromium, a Linux version by Google based on the same engine, is still not ready for prime time. I really like being able to go from the Windows world to the Linux world and have a similar browsing environment in each.
In short, it would take an awful lot to get me to switch; Chrome/Chromium will have to evolve a lot more and/or the Mozilla team behind Firefox will have start sleeping at the switch, letting Firefox fall technologically behind, in order to move me back to a proprietary product. Firefox's latest 3.5 release, with a much smaller memory footprint, lower CPU load, and much faster rendering times than previous versions, plus the addition of some neat new features and judicious refinements of old ones, shows no evidence that Mozilla intends to be caught sleeping any time soon.