Google Chrome’s Beta for Mac has me impressed. For months Firefox has been becoming less and less reliable, a trend that I haven’t been the only one experiencing – I hear more and more complaints from fellow Firefox users every day. I’ve attempted switching away from Firefox numerous times in the past, but every time I was drawn back by a minute detail. For Safari 4, that was the lack of a multifunctional address bar and very basic and inefficient tab functionality, as well as a bookmarking system quickly falling behind the times.
Where Firefox lost me
I remember the release of Firefox 3 for Mac and how it satisfied (and then some) so many of the grudges Mac users had with the existing release of the browser. It was slow, crashed all the time, and hung for no particular reason frequently. at least that’s what I remember of it, but at the time it was the best option (followed by Camino, lacking fairly seriously in the feature department). 3.0 came as a breath of fresh air. Since the, however, my issues with Firefox 3.5.5 are largely the same as they were just before the 3.0 release. Firefox hangs during trivial tasks, Flash is abysmal, and there’s a general feeling of bloatedness. I heard many complaints about crashing, which I was actually lucky to experience very little, and when I did Firefox made good work of restoring my session.
My issue with Firefox was how it progressively slows down over time, to the point where it becomes a chore to open a web page. The fix, of course, was to purge your profile and start from scratch. Let’s be honest, though, this is no more an acceptable fix than formatting & reinstalling Windows every time you get a virus. At one point, an SQLite cleanup sped things up significantly for a week or two. The reality is that well-used Firefox profile on OS X is doomed to eventual slowness, be it after a month or a year.
Hesitation
I, like most Firefox users, relied heavily on my extensions – or at least, I thought I did. Each time I looked through them, however, I found less and less that I actually needed to hang on to. I got down to the point where Adblock Plus, Firebug, and Web Developer Toolbar were the only ones I felt I needed. A few searches later and I’ve found that Chrome includes a complete developer kit by default, leaving only Adblock Plus. I sucked it up and dragged Chrome into my dock.
What Chrome did right
Chrome impressed me from the start with its interface. The Invisible posted a fantastic in-depth look at some of the design and usability features that make this interface work, and I completely agree with everything outlined. One of the extensions I relied on in Firefox was Tab Mix Plus (not mentioned previously because its purpose is specific to Firefox’s functionality), really for only two features.
First, the ability to focus last selected tab on closing a tab. I’ve written about this before, because having my browsing session interrupted by having to re-orient myself after closing a tab really annoys me. This, however, was fixed in Chrome’s interface with a more elegant solution; Chrome opens tabs immediately to the right of the previous tab, and when you close a tab it gives focus to the first tab on its left. There was one oversight, however, and that’s that this fix does not carry through to Control+tab tab traversing, which simply selects the tab to the right with each Tab.
Second, that absolutely fantastic Duplicate Tab context menu item. What the function does is create a new tab with the same page opened, but also the same history (forward and backward) as the source tab. This lets you branch your browsing session and prevents having to choose one of a couple enticing links on a page to click, likely forgetting about the others on return (not the best example, but I’ll leave it to your imagination how it would be used). To my delight, someone down at Google shared my sentiment and it’s included in Chrome’s tab context menu.
Now, what did Google really do wrong? The short answer is I’ll get back to you, because I’ve been using Chrome for nearly a week but have yet to find any glaring issues.