Friday, February 18, 2011

Making the change

After more than 5 years of - almost exclusively - using Firefox as my Web browser, it is hard to even contemplate trying to use something else.  I am set in my ways.

And the few times I'd experimented with GoogleChrome when it first appeared, I'd been deeply unimpressed.  It wasn't nearly as fast as advertised (even worse than Firefox for video streaming, I found), and.... well, I can't quite remember what it was that bugged me about it (apart from the fact it didn't look like Firefox), but it definitely rubbed me up the wrong way - something, I think, to do with the browsing history, and the ability, or lack of it, to flip to and fro between websites visited in sequence.

I have - grudgingly, digging in my heels every inch of the way - returned to it over the last couple of days.  And there are still things I don't like about it: an unwanted Spellcheck feature in American English, no drop-down 'recent history' menu showing sites visited under the current tab, the tab labels tiny and unilluminated (WTF??!!) in a narrow strip along the top of the window that's very difficult to see, Hong Kong as the default routing for Google (which leads me to doubt whether my VPN is working quite as it should), and no automatic saving of tabs if I close the program.  Grave problems, indeed.

But it is now dizzyingly FAST (at least compared to what I've become used to).  And it doesn't crash all the time.

I think I may have used lumbering, glitchy, unstable Firefox for the last time.


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