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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Foxy versus Shiny.

I've been using Mozilla Firefox for about six years. It's a very good browser, but it occasionally annoys me by acting like a Giant Panda i.e. it becomes very sluggish. It's possible to speed-up Firefox by going to about:memory and clicking on the "Minimise memory usage" button, but occasionally, I have to shut down Firefox, wait (sometimes for quite a long time) for it to disappear from memory, then restart.
I therefore decided to have an affair with Google Chrome.

First impressions were good. Chrome installed quickly and it imported all of my Firefox bookmarks correctly, although it didn't import any website user-names & passwords (probably because they are protected).

Chrome has an extensive range of add-ons available. I was able to install Adblock Element Hiding Helper (which had all of the functionality of Adblock Plus, plus some extra features), Script No and Flag. With all of these installed, Chrome loaded pages very quickly.

Then cracks started to appear in the relationship.

Chrome has a grey bar at the top of the page which obscures things on the page. Double-clicking on it makes it disappear. Reloading the page makes it reappear. Using Adblock Element Hiding Helper, I could hide the grey bar (Alt+B, click on grey bar, Enter) on any particular site, but it occasionally reappears, requiring re-hiding.

Right-clicking on a link and selecting "Open link in new tab" opens a new tab but doesn't display it, requiring the user to click on the new tab. Firefox used to do this, but has worked correctly for a long time.

Watching videos on ITVPlayer, I noticed that the resolution appeared much lower than when played on Firefox. On Firefox, there's pixel interpolation which produces a much higher apparent resolution.

And the killer blow:-

When I created a new blog post, I couldn't set hyperlink text colour and the Html editor revealed a large number of spurious div & span tags.

That's it, Google Chrome. You're dumped!

EDIT: P.S. Firefox has been running faster.

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