A month with Google Chrome

Some of you may remember my inflammatory article about the demise of firefox, and I thought it would be wise to post a follow up as I am a man of my word and when the situation on the ground changes, I like to re-evaluate my opinions. As stated in the previous article, once chromium became usable on linux, I began testing the nightly builds. Once that had come far enough along, I made the switch to google-unstable which is a more polished version of chromium. I have now been using google chrome in place of Firefox for nearly a month now and I wanted to share my experience.

Now I should note that I was excited when Firefox 3.5 finally came out with its much revampled JIT javascript compiler. I was expecting quite a bit of a performance boost in all the javascript heavy web applications that I both use and develop. At first there was a notable improvement but honestly it was nothing to write home about. After a while I found that it was still plagued with a lot of the same usability problems that 3.0 had such as the horrendous memory leaks and lagged user interface. The good news is, it seems to crash less. So I can say that I gave it its fair opportunity to repair its reputation in my eyes.

Chrome did not become fully usable to me until they enabled the flash plugin. I first played with it in one of the nightly builds but found that the performance was lacking, but when I jumped to the unstable version, not only had they resolved the performance problem, it ended being much smoother than the flash experience in firefox; quite contradictory to what I read that I should expect.

Now the next part is not an exaggeration: the general performance of the browser when surfing pages (both javascript heavy and not) is so bleeping fast that I can’t help but be giddy doing my daily work in chrome. When clicking on links, the transition from one page to another is near instantaneous and sites that are notoriously sluggish in firefox hum along. A good example is Plesk, an server adminstration interface I use quite frequently in my line of work goes from an agitating and unbearable experience, to somewhat pleasant. To be blunt its like comparing a toyota corolla to formula one racer in regards to the performance difference between firefox and chrome. Keep in mind this is an unstable pre-release version…

Chrome is not without its annoyances especially during a day of heavy web application development. There was an intermediate version that had its ‘inspect this element’ feature broken which slowed me down but the next version promptly fixed it. For the most part, the developer tools provided by webkit provide much of the functionality of firebug for firefox. I still find myself falling back on firefox atleast a couple times a day for websites that cause a chrome tab to crash. I also fall back on firebug for troubleshooting buggy javascript as I have not fully learned how to leverage the console in webkit.

Each new version that gets released for google chrome provides one more nail in Mozilla’s coffin in my opinion which is unfortunate as I have been a huge advocate for Mozilla over the years. I believe that this will be a snow ball trend especially with the proliferation of html5. I think Mozilla made a huge mistake not embracing h264 for its supported video codec for the new standard. With all of the big players embracing h264 and Mozilla embracing theora, I believe that firefox will get marginalized and rapidly become irrelevant when huge sites such as youtube make the switch away from flash. Seems like the folks are asleep at the wheel at Mozilla. Has anyone there even bothered using chrome to see what the competition is up to?

Google chrome is a winner in my book and has become my default browser in linux and windows. I will start recommending it over firefox to my friends and family. Let’s hope this puts a fire under Mozilla’s ass for Firefox 4.