Chrome
I’ve been running the dev build of Chrome as my primary browser now for a couple of weeks. I probably wouldn’t recommend it for everyone since the bugginess of the dev build varies, though this week is quite good. I figure I could at least contribute something back, so I test the dev build.
The new version of Safari 4 is interesting. It is very similar to Chrome, but ultimately there are two reasons that I prefer Chrome over other browsers.
- The “awesomebar”. I’m don’t recall what Google call their URL/search input box, but I find that it works incredibly. Makes it difficult to use other browsers. Google’s version is extra awesome because it suggests searches as well as searching your history and what not.
- Multiprocessing. Sure it’s great when plugins crash or something. But that happens less frequently now. The benefit that I derive more frequently is that my browser can now take advantage of multiple processors and multiple cores! Hurray! I’m probably a “heavy” web browsers. I don’t really use bookmarks. I have a handful of “favorite” sites that I remember, and for things that I am in the middle of I just leave the browser open. So right now I have 15 Chrome windows and 16 Firefox windows open, each with varying number of tabs. Sometimes I’ll be browsing to windows at once with various number of Flash ads and maybe a Flash video playing which I read in another window. If there is too much going on with Firefox, the video will skip and start to annoy me. However, with Chrome, it can use both cores. Joy! I guess it is inevitable that the other processors will need to support multiple processors/cores.
The one thing that bugs me about Chrome is when I ctrl-click on a headline in Google Reader, it doesn’t open the tab in the background. Oh well. I’ve submitted bugs, maybe it’ll get fixed.