Not quite as cunning as a fox

When Chrome, Google's open-source browser, was released last summer, I jumped at the opportunity to use it. My first impression, along with everyone else, was "wow, it's fast". So I confidently set it as my default browser, displacing my trusty Firefox. Then, three months later, everything suddenly went a bit wrong. Every website I loaded looked a bit skewy, and my bookmark bar disappeared. With some tugs at my heart strings, I relinquished Google's monopoly over my Internet browsing, and returned to my faithful Firefox (who never even spoke of the betrayal).

Two months ago I started to reminisce about Chrome. In fact, I almost totally forgot about the incident that repelled me away from it, and began to think that maybe it was all somehow my fault anyway. Besides, it had been several months since I last used the new browser, and all the bugs must have been ironed out. Right?

Let the issues begin

I installed Chrome again, with equally strong senses of individuality and sentimentality. I loaded it up. Wow, it's fast. After doing my first Google search, I hit upon the first problem: middle clicking doesn't provide a page scroller! I felt as if I'd just bought my dream car to find that they didn't include a steering wheel. Of course, I tried to rationalise it. Google Chrome is meant to be a lightweight browser, and you don't want fat, ugly bits of code such as a middle mouse auto-scroller hogging all of your system processes. Yeh, that must be it.

Then I found out about Chromium. This is the open-source project behind Chrome, with which developers can get their hands dirty. And that DOES have an auto-scroller, for some reason. My understanding is that Chromium is updated more frequently, and the successes are translated into new releases of Chrome. So I was happy, or at least until the next bunch of problems.

Every so often, my bookmarks disappeared, to be replaced by a blue bar. This was pretty annoying, and could only be rectified by a total restart of Chrome, where all tabs have to be closed. A very common problem was where flash videos would stop playing due to a code interpretation error, where Firefox would be able to get round them without having to tell you. A final issue that got to me was in the display of certain pages that use Javascript menu rollovers. If you have Chrome, go to emmanuel.org.uk or friendmts.co.uk. The pages are pretty tricky to navigate, and no other browser I've come across has a problem.

Explain this one

Then came the last straw. I uploaded an image for a website I've been working on for a while, and Chromium said that it was broken. I checked both the path and the image, and everything was fine. I was scratching my head for about ten minutes (must have been a pretty weird thing to see) until I thought I'd try Firefox, even though there could be no logical reason for a browser not displaying one image in particular. But then Firefox showed the image perfectly, as did IE, Safari, Opera...

So I switched back to Firefox. I can cope with the slower initial load time, since it gives me stability and reliability in the long run. In the past I've been shocked by the amount of RAM that Firefox uses, but actually this is automatically determined for your system, and it uses a lot because I have a huge amount available. And the memory is used for a reason, as Firefox caches information for future use. However, Firefox does have to work on memory fragmentation, an issue directly addressed by Chrome.

The thing is, I've been sucked in by Google's vision and ideals. Their browser is full of great ideas. Each tab is an isolated process, so essentially if one goes wrong they don't all suffer. Javascript interpretation has been completely redefined, and is a lot faster to execute (in theory). They've even written a comic to describe these features, which really sucked me in. This may be the future of browsing, but I'm not enough of an advocate to put up with the present.