Monday, March 08, 2010

My Love Affiar with Chrome

Forgive me father for I have sinned. It's been quite some time since my last confession during which I have committed the sin of "Browser Adultery".

It all started out quite innocently a little over a year ago when I read about a young and pretty Browser named Chrome. Reading through the blogs and magazine reviews she appeared to be the ultimate and sexiest browser, wanted by almost every man and woman alike. Who couldn't fall in love with those tight curves and straight lines. Her father, Google, claimed that she was the fastest, lightest and most stable browser on the market at the time and attempted to pawn her off on all those window folk. During this time, however, she was mainly a dream to me since I don't run Windows.

As the months passed her father opened her up to the world of Linux that I live in. Resisting temptation and not wanting to let go of my darling FireFox, I held back preferring to read about her and view her pictures instead. However, slowly, one by one, my friends succumbed to her and it was only inevitable that I would too.

We began flirtations a few months ago; I'd try and bring her into my computer only to have her refuse to install and work for numerous and varied reasons. In retrospect I should have realized this as being a sign of immaturity, but I persisted. Finally about two weeks ago I managed to get a build of Chrome that installed and worked on my computer. It was love at first sight. She was quick, sexy and flirtatious with all of her extensions. Pushing her buttons and tweaking her settings were pure joy, leaving me breathless and wanting more. Every website I viewed jumped right out almost instantly; The Internet as whole seemed faster when compared to my browser of 9 years. Now, I know FireFox will be getting face lifts and features found in Chrome, however, I had it all now so why wait.

Every time we played she'd ask for my commitment to make her my default browser. Finally, in a daze I agreed. Soon after, her dark side began to show. The first signs were of greed with excessive memory consumption, even with a reduced number of tabs. Like the boyfriend in denial, I started to blame myself; Removing and disabling extensions that were nice to haves and so on. I even went as far as giving her space by shutting her down after every session.

But alas all this was in vein as she eventually succumbed to failure; Chrome has a feature that's supposed to isolate a tab and extension from others. This allows for secure separation, however, in my case under Linux, this did not work as advertised. Instead imagine to my surprise when I discovered that all my open tabs failed and displayed the "I'm sick" icon. In disbelief I proceeded, ignoring what happened, thinking that this was a mere one off situation. Soon enough, however, things got worst. Periodically she'd fail and crash altogether, however, unlike FireFox where tabs can be restored upon restart from a crash, I'd loose all my open tabs and end up having to scour through my browser history to work out what I had open at the time. A pain to say the least!

Finally today, after two weeks, I'd had enough. I'd gone through councilling using Google to find out what might be wrong, to no avail. Then finally when I was using FireFox on my work computer it struck me that I had some 20 odd tabs open, reasonable memory consumption and not a single crash in the week the browser had been running without a restart. I'd opened my eyes to see Chrome for who she truly was; An immature browser that still has some growing up to do. Today I annulled Chrome by removing her from my computer. I've gone back to FireFox; My old faithful; My saviour from the dark days of IE.

Who knows we may have another fling in the future as Chrome matures. But for now I'll stick with the one that whilst not as pretty and sexy as Chrome, "just works". The short fling we had opened my eyes to what's truly possible and I breathlessly await to experience this kind of joy again in the future, perhaps with FireFox this time or maybe even Chrome again.

1 comment:

mahakk01 said...

I really like the way you explain your love for Chrome. I have to agree with you that Chrome is my favorite browser too.I get so addicted with its features and looks that I just can't think about any other. You surely impressed your readers with your writing style.
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