Babblative

Last week my brother mentioned to me that he was considering switching to Chrome. He said that it was because Firefox was a resource hog and Chrome’s themes were better than any Persona or old style theme people could come up with. (Sadly, it’s true. Chrome’s themes are infinitely better than Firefox’s Persona’s or themes. More on that later.) I found myself nodding in agreement, I hadn’t been happy with Firefox for a while and was really just waiting for the extensions to coming out.

So now that I’ve made the switch I’ve got a few observations to make:

• Persona’s are ugly; even uglier than the original themes for Firefox, if you can believe it possible. Essentially all they are, are images placed on the browsers chrome. Chrome themes are similar, but a little better thought out, the tabs and browser bars all have separate background colours to distinguish them from the background images or colours.
• It’s faster. Firefox was regularly eating up 300mb+ after running for an hour or so. Chrome on the other hand takes up 150mb-, less than half of what Firefox was!*
• No restarts for themes or extensions!
• I love the Windows style task manager that lets you manage the browser and the extensions. If an extension or tab starts causing problems you simply press Alt+Shift+Esc to bring up the task manager.

There are a few cons, I’m a devoted Ubiquity fan and the fact that I haven’t had it since Firefox 3.6 came out is sad; I still find myself pressing Ctrl+Space all. the. time. The browser doesn’t freeze up that often, but when it does, boy does it freeze. At least the task manager lets you take care of it right away. I don’t foresee myself switching back to Firefox any time soon. Not unless the developers make it into the slim, customizable browser that it was 6 years ago.

*I know, I know everyone’s experience is different, but here’s the thing: My computer is ancient. I’m running Photoshop CS2 (version 5 will be out soon, I believe) and my computer wheezes and gasps whenever I try to open that! Needless to say the new features that the developers were piling onto Firefox weren’t allowing me enough room to have a pile of memory-hogging extensions.