iRelle

The other night I decided to put aside my completely unwarranted bias and give the Google Chrome internet browser a chance to prove what it can do. I’ve had the thing installed on my computer for months, but until now I’ve only used it when the nerdy situation arose and I needed to sign in with two different accounts on a website. But I decided to throw caution to the winds, abandon my not-so-trusty Firefox browser – which had been messing around with my most frequently clicked on sites anyway – and give ol’ Google the chance they’ve been asking for.

Before I go any further, I hasten to point out that uninstalling Internet Explorer was the very first thing I did when I bought this computer (well, okay, the very first thing I did was use IE to download Firefox. Then I uninstalled it). IE seems to run slower and have more compatibility issues than Firefox or Chrome, and I lose my patience with it very quickly. Firefox has been my browser of choice for a couple of years now, and I think I know it pretty well. I find my hands automatically clicking through the shortcuts and my brain moving seconds ahead of the rest of my brain when I want to find something. So how does Chrome stack up?

The very first thing I did was set up my bookmarks bar – incidentally, I love how this just slips in and out with the touch of a key combo, giving me that extra half a centimetre of space when I’m just cruising… on my tiny laptop screen, that extra space really does make a difference! But the first complaint I have against Chrome popped up right here in the bookmarks bar – or rather, it didn’t. Chrome doesn’t support RSS or live atom feeds! I have a list of webcomics a mile long, and most of them run an RSS feed so that with the hover of a cursor I can see whether they’ve updated or not. Chrome, for some bizarre reason of its own, doesn’t want me to have this convenience. I suspect it’s all a conspiracy to make me use Google Reader – which I am absolutely not going to do! I mean, it’s ugly!

The thing that does win me over to Chrome is the awesomeness of the address bar. It can interpret what you’re writing and convert it into suggestions, starting with sites that you’ve visited before and ranging to popular website URLS or just a plain old Google search. No more hunting for the search box on the toolbar, or worse, clicking the Google link – just type it in the address bar and hit enter! Firefox has the previously-visited suggestions feature, which in itself makes bookmarks almost obsolete, but Google kicks it up a few notches with the suggested URLs and the Google search. To use an overworked tech label, it really is intuitive!

The other major bone I have to pick with Chrome is that it’s just not that easy to customise it. Sure, there are thousands – probably even millions – of skins to choose from, but you have to manually download the file, unzip it, find the Google properties, replace the file… it gets messy. The big drawcard for Firefox’s latest version, released only a week ago, are Personas. With one single click, you can change the look of your browser to suit every whim. Feeling like a bit of Golidlocks nostalgia? No problem. Want to switch it up with a bit of a punk music vibe? Hey presto!

Now, I’ve been known to boycott a restaurant if I don’t like the colour of their walls (not to malign anyone in particular, but the Jailhouse Grill has terrible decor!), and I actually refused to get a Facebook account for more than a year because I don’t like the standard blue. So I’m not sure that I can live with the minimalistic grey and the arduous process of changing skins in Chrome. The only consolation is that I haven’t found a Firefox persona that I absolutely can’t live without… but it’s only a matter of time!

All in all, the performance of the browsers stacks up about the same – Chrome may load pages just a tiny bit faster, and at least it doesn’t jumble the pages that I read twenty times a day, but Firefox is all about having everything at my fingertips – including an almost bottomless pit of visual splendour. Weighing the customisation against the convenience of bookmarks, history and Google at my fingertips… I’d say the jury is still out on this one.

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