Browser Battle

 

Back in the dark ages, it took me a while to switch to Firefox but once I did I loved it.  LOVED IT!

All those addons.  The tabbed browsing.  So much goodness.

Then came Chrome.  I tried to like Chrome.  I’m an admitted Google fanboi but I still couldn’t do without some of the features of Firefox I had grown to love.

The pivotal feature became Delicious Bookmarks.  I loved having the exact same bookmarks on every machine. Delicious allowed me that luxury.  I know what you are thinking, “But Firefox and Chrome both offer syncing.” Yes, they do NOW but they didn’t then.  None of the Delicious addons for Chrome worked the same way that they in Firefox.

As soon as Chrome offered bookmark syncing I switched.  It was painful – so many things I had relied on in Firefox just weren’t there in Chrome but I learned to live without or found another source for those features.

It wasn’t long after that that Yahoo announced they were selling Delicious and were no longer supporting it.  That was a huge let down for a lot of my friends that used it daily.  By then I was already using Chrome Bookmarks so it didn’t really impact me.

Yesterday Google released the updated GReader.  It sure is purdy.  But.  But, it doesn’t do anything for the horrible lag I get in Chrome when I go through my Greader.  I follow many feeds and read a large number of items daily.  I use the expanded format which, granted, uses more resources, BUT (yes, BIG BUT) even my totally pimped out laptop struggles with the rate at which I go through the items in my reader so I’m inclined to believe that it isn’t a hardware issue at all.

For many reasons I keep Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome on all my machines.  I did figure out a pretty easy way to get my bookmarks from Chrome into Firefox (I don’t even bother to do that with Internet Explorer because my usage is limited to extreme cases) so that made the hassle of switching from one to the other a little easier.

With all the latest improvements to Firefox I just had to give it another try.  I notice NONE of the lag going through my GReader that I get when I do it in Chrome.  None.  That’s a big plus.  Huge. Ginormous.

I think I will be using Firefox for a while – at least a week – and see if I still want to go back to Chrome.  All my previous attempts to go back to Firefox have been short lived.  Funny how you get used to something and don’t want to change. Damn old people .

It looks like Firefox’s concentration on speed and memory management have finally paid off for them.  I just wonder if all those people switching to Chrome should have waited for the latest version of Firefox before doing so.  I gotta tell ya, Firefox 7.0.1 is speedy.