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Chrome

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I know I’ve missed the Chrome-rambling bandwagon by several months. Everything that can be said about Google Chrome has probably already been said, and probably a thousand times over. Luckily (or unluckily, as it may be) for you, I have not read any of those thousands of articles (except the ones about the original TOS; I did read those) and will approach my whining completely unaffected by such comments.

I’ve been using Google Chrome for the past few weeks, after several years of being a devoted Firefox user. I do like Firefox, but there comes a point at which even my lazy self won’t tolerate having all my preferences wiped at random when my laptop crashes. It crashes every day! My preferences didn’t get wiped every day, but even if they were only wiped 5% of the time, that’s once every three weeks. It simply wouldn’t do.

In the hope that Google Chrome would more reliably store my settings, I decided to try it out. I haven’t decided whether or not it’s an acceptable replacement for Firefox (I haven’t even set it as my default browser), but in certain regards it’s much better. It has not once deleted all my preferences, for instance. Unfortunately, there are also ways in which it really does not match up…

The first problem I had with Chrome was with its tabs. If I click a tab and move my cursor too fast, that tab becomes a new window. Worse, it is really hard to put the tab back where it belongs. It becomes a game: can you find the magical pixel over which you must drag your new window to make it go back? If not, you lose! (It’s kind of a self-explanatory game.) Seriously though, this makes any task that involves frequently switching between tabs (e.g. reading the news) intimidating. I don’t want to play that game!

The second problem I have with Chrome is that (my installation of) Chrome is really lazy about loading pages. It’s like it goes, “Man, this page takes more than a second to load? I’m out!” And then it throws up some error page like, “Are you sure this page even exists? I don’t think it exists. How about you find something else to read?”

Blocking ads in Chrome isn’t very easy, certainly not like Firefox where all you have to do is download one extension. Blocking ads in Chrome is hard work. You have to download some extra program called Privoxy which allows you to create something like a firewall between you and the world. And rather than blocking politically sensitive information, you can block ads! (Well, don’t get me wrong, you can block politically sensitive information too. However, seeing as it’s pretty much pointless to block such information from YOURSELF, a better use of this program is to block ads.)

Unfortunately, I’m unconvinced of this way’s efficacy. Sure, it blocks ads. However, it’s not very straightforward to set up. The first time I tried it, I managed to block the entire Internet from myself. (Evidently I fixed it.) The second time I tried it, everything loaded really slowly. Since my Chrome is hardly “the little browser that could”, I ended up with a lot of half-loaded, imageless pages. It then suddenly sped up. I guess right at this minute, this solution is working. These difficulties don’t make me feel particularly secure, though.

Why do I stick with Chrome then, despite all these annoyances? Well, I’m not totally sure I’m going to, but here’s why I have so far:

  1. It hasn’t once deleted my settings!
  2. The browser’s design is very minimalistic, and I like it.
  3. I like the way each tab is split into a separate process. In Firefox, one tab would hang and the entire browser would become unusable. In Chrome, one tab hangs and I can kill it — and even if I kill it, I can reload it to retry the exact same page.
  4. Firefox would also have issues where I’d close it, but get told that it was still running when I tried to reopen it the following day. Then I have to kill the process from the task manager, which is an unnecessary chore I shouldn’t have to do. Chrome doesn’t do this.

So I’m still a little undecided, but I’m sticking with Chrome for now. I mean, I never agreed to that old TOS which would have handed Google permission to use anything I typed in Chrome in any way it saw fit (or whatever that crazy thing said), so there’s no reason not to, right?

For everyone wandering past and contemplating commenting (ha, or not), here’s a question for you. Which browser do you use, and why?



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