I think I’m ready to call it official and say that I’m a convert to using Google’s browser Chome.

Up until pretty recently I’ve been a devotee of Firefox and I would say that I’m still a pretty big fan.  I will keep up with development of the browser’s new features and improvements, but for the most part I’ll be using Chrome for most of my browsing needs.

Here are a few thoughts on what I see as the advantages and disadvantages of Chrome in comparison to Firefox.  I’m not going to address Internet Explorer because I don’t like it and try to avoid using it whenever I can.

The goodness of Chrome:

At the most basic level, I think Chrome is a faster browser overall. It seems to load much faster than Firefox does. Also, it seems like it does a better job of loading webpages quicker.

One feature I love is that you can set the browser so that it will automatically set a couple of pages to load up on startup.   Every day when I get home I always pull up Gmail, Facebook, and the admin page for this blog.  The way I have chrome set, those three pages are loaded in three separate tabs as soon as I open it up. Maybe this isn’t a unique feature in Chrome but that’s where I found it so it gets the credit.

Another feature I love is when you open a new tab it gives you thumbnails of pages the sites that you visit the most.  its sort of like having having bookmarks in a graphic setup as soon as you open a new brower window.  Its a pretty simple thing, but I think its really cool.

The badness of Chrome (features it doesn’t have that I wish it did):

First and foremost, I miss having Sage in Firefox.  For that matter I’m not aware of any solid RSS reader for Chrome yet, and I hope that is something that gets addressed very soon.  And for what its worth, my browsing life was made happier when I started using Sage.

I also really miss the “Undo close tab” feature.  I have a tendency to open a ton of pages when I’m bouncing around the Internets.  At some point I get to a place where I start closing down the ones that I don’t want anymore.  Inevitably I realize that I just closed one that I didn’t want to close right after I hit the button. On Firefox you can just right-click and “undo close tab,” but I’m not aware of a similar feature on Chrome.

The last thing is totally random but I still don’t like it. The button to stop loading a page is on the right side of the interface, which is the exact opposite of what I expect so I can never find it when I want to.

Despite my current complaints, I see Chrome as the best browser fit for me at the moment.  I’ll check out the newest version of Firefox when they release it, because I’ve heard its supposed to make some great improvements in terms of speed and page rendering.

Okay, I lied a little.  The reasons I don’t like Internet Explorer is because its clunky.  In my experience its the slowest of the mainstream browsers.  Also, b/c it has the largest marketshare, more hackers are inclined to exploit the vulnerabilities that are found in the browser.