Firefox vs. Chrome

Not one to jump on the cool-train for the heck of it, I refrained from testdriving Google Chrome for a long time. Yet … even after a relatively short testdrive I’m sorely disappointed. It’s supposed to have this neat feature where it processes tabs and certain processes seperately, thus making it more stable than its current rivals (most notably Firefox). I have not had a crash with Firefox in years, and the ones I did have was because malicious sites borked my system. And Acrobat is a piece of shit software, hogging all the resources and bandwidth, making Firefox and Explorer crash. The rest of the time, Firefox runs smoothly, and above all, fast. Chrome was hailed as the fastest browser around, and yet, I have yet to notice this supposed speed. I use 5 addons in Firefox, which by the way are “notorious” for slowing a browser down. Adblock, Rikaichan, Nipponster Toolbar, Zotero and DownloadHelper. And I must say, Firefox out-performs Chrome in terms of speed. The time it took Chrome to load the ads and large, unnecessary and unwanted pictures, was double the time I clocked Firefox loading the same page, with a freshly cleaned history as well. I purged my entire private data file, including cookies, browsing history, cache, search history and saved form history. Yet it still sped past Chrome.

I guess what I’m trying to say is; I’m glad I didn’t jump on the band-wagon with all the fan boys and nerds, and rationally tested this new browser. It has come up short compared to Firefox, which I will continue to use, until Chrome implements the ability to add extensions. Then I will retest both browsers. But until then, Chrome is second rate, slow, and less user friendly (uncustomisable tab options (meaning there are *none*), and you need to be a handyman as a developer to tinker with the advanced options without borking the browser).

~ by belowme on February 2, 2009.