sparkymat » firefox http://blog.sparkymat.net Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:11:10 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 An obligatory post on Chrome http://blog.sparkymat.net/2008/09/04/an-obligatory-post-on-chrome/ http://blog.sparkymat.net/2008/09/04/an-obligatory-post-on-chrome/#comments Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:35:42 +0000 max http://blog.sparkymat.net/?p=227 A couple of days back, Google Chrome was launched. The Firefox crowd scratched their heads and muttered ‘What the hell?!’, the Opera crowd sighed and the IE crowd pretended they didn’t notice. Apart from the usual Google trumpet-blowing, what caught my atttention was benchmarks that claimed that it was faster than the competition by a HUGE margin. So, out of obligation to my experimental side, I tried it out. My feelings are as follows.

The Good

  • Fast. Blazingly fast. Blows the compeition clean out of the water (IE7/8 would hit escape velocity)
  • Clean, slick (white) interface. Typical Google-ish style. Nice and easy-to-use.
  • Open source!
  • Larger real-estate. Title-bar and menu-bar done away with.
  • (Possibly) The ability to kill individual scripts/tabs via the “task manager” (haven’t tried this out yet)

The Bad

  • Not available on Linux/Mac (yet)
  • Per-tab memory consumption is larger (though for my typical usage, the total seems to be lesser)
  • Extensions
  • Themes

The Ugly

  • Have you seen the EULA?!!! (this has been corrected now)
  • Security. Where the hell is my security? (http://www.p2pnet.net/story/16889)
  • Anti-phishing (not sure if its there in Chrome)
  • Google (post pending on my long-standing distrust of Google, and yes, I do use their search a lot)

The Meh

  • Separate process per tab – Mixed bag. Task-manager : good. Overhead : bad.
  • Mozilla: “How could you do this to us?!”

The Random

  • Was fastest browser for a whole day (or two?) before Mozilla came out with benchmark results that showed the Firefox 3.1 nightly build to be faster than Chrome (or was it just V8 vs TraceMonkey?)
  • Linux users can build PARTS of it. x-( . Well, screw you Google! We will stay loyal to Mozilla! (of course, only until you release the Linux version ;-) )
  • Most of the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’ will (probably) get fixed in subsequent releases, but some things won’t change.
  • What are they planning?
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