For years I’ve been an advocate of dumping Internet Exploer. My biggest problems have always been IE’s security issues and more importantly the way it tends not to properly render HTML correctly. Around 4 to 5 years ago I made the move to make Firefox my primary browser and never looked back. Aside from the occasional ActiveX plugin I needed, I’ve rarely opened Internet Explorer since (aside from testing websites to make sure they work).

Skip ahead to 2011 and Firefox is a bogged down, memory hogging software and a real struggle to work with. Although I still preferred Firefox over Internet Explorer, I can’t say I was happy with Firefox by any means. I decided that it was time for me to try on the browser my brother had been recommending for awhile – Google Chrome.

I decided to try it out around March this year and ever since then it’s become my primary browser. I’ll admit that it took me a couple months to tick that box that made it the default browser; however, when I did, I didn’t look back. In fact – all of my computers now have Google Chrome as the main browser.

So what’s good? Well first off – everything loads faster hands down. Whether you’re viewing the site for the first time, or if you’re using a bit of cache, for sure you’re going to find that Chrome loads pages faster than Firefox. I also will note that some of the sites I operate use wordpress. Those who have used it before know that wordpress will put an admin bar on the top of the site when you’re logged in. A known bug with this bar is that it slows down the load time of your site significantly when you’re logged it – I’m happy to report that with Google Chrome, this does not happen.

Putting speed aside, the next best feature by far has to be the removal of a search bar. For years society has been trained to decide whether they want to enter a URL or a search term. Depending on what the user chose they had to decide which bar to use. With Chrome the two are combined so you enter everything in the same spot all the time. I think is especially good for novice users. I often will see people type a URL in their search bar OR even enter it in Google search – with Chrome these users can just learn to type EVERYTHING in the address bar all the time. If they enter a URL they will end up at the site they want, as opposed to before where they’d end up at Google search results for their URL if they accidentally typed it in the search bar. On the flip side if they mis-type a URL or type search terms, they’ll still get their search – a vast improvement to the past functioning of browsers.

Finally, the third feature I like is the “Inspect Element” feature of Chrome. When I’m working on a website and I want to find out where in the source code a specific item is, I just right click on, go to inspect element, and it points me in the right direction. This is a great feature as web coders can’t be expected to remember every piece of code on the site they’re working on – it’s just not going to happen. It’s a great time saver and has already saved me a ton of stress and headaches.

Now what don’t I like? Well the biggest feature for me is that I often run into an issue where the first time I load a website for the day, I’ll get a proxy message in my status bar and will cause the page to take awhile to load. If I close the browser down and open it back up, the issue is resolved. It appears I was able to solve the problem by disabling “Automatically Detect Settings” in my connection settings; however, I’ve never had this issue in Firefox or Internet Explorer so I shouldn’t have had to do this.

The second biggest complaint is that I can’t seem to find a way to open up an image in a separate tab. Often in Firefox if I needed to access an image directly I could right click on it and I had the option to view it in a separate tab – this doesn’t seem to exist in Chrome. It’s just a minor quirk; however, its enough to make me wish it were there.

Putting those two issues aside, I am very happy with Chrome. The performance is vastly superior to Firefox and I suggest it for all users. Chrome isn’t the prettiest tool in the shed, but it’s definitely the sharpest one.