While Firefox continues to get more bloated and slower, Chrome seems to be getting better while continuing to gain acceptance. Although only 7 percent of the visitors to this site use Chrome, that percentage is up from a couple of months ago.
My only disappointment with Google’s development of Chrome has been that the Mac version, Chromium, did not have a bookmarks manager. Now it has one, though, and that is all it took to get me to begin using it regularly. I am writing this post using Chromium.
It is very snappy and loads pages faster than either Firefox or Safari, at least on my machine. The only downside that I see at this point is that it did not import all of my bookmarks from Safari. But it imported enough for me to be happy with it. (I have not tried getting the Firefox bookmarks into it.)
I’ve only run into one site so far that doesn’t render well under Chromium: Twitter. Actually, when it renders, it renders fine … it’s just that it sometimes get stuck at the blank screen mode. I am assuming at this point that it is something that Twitter has screwed up on its end rather than a real problem with Chromium. After all, Twitter has lost over 3000 of my tweets (more on this later). But, it could also be a problem with Chromium … I do not know at this point.
If you haven’t tried out either the Windows or Mac versions yet, Chrome and Chromium are now well developed enough to warrant you giving them a look. There is also a Linux version, but I haven’t tried it out yet. Of course, if you are addicted to the many extensions that Firefox has, you are going to find it hard to switch to another browser. On the other hand, if you are like me and think most of the Firefox extensions just slow it down instead of being helpful, then you’ll like the speed of Chrome.