I had noticed a couple of problems when using my otherwise fine Firefox 3.6, one been the pause when you first go to a page and the other was the browser crashing when trying to view Justin.TV Archives function (when it got to the end of the segment).
I was tempted to try Google Chrome after everybody told me how good it was, faster, better and all round amazing. Could I take Chrome and make it my main browsing platform? Had it come a long way since I last tried it? Did it use a lot less memory and was it more secure?
The Past
While I had tried it some time ago and said how good it was (at the time), I was not happy that it did not know how to handle FTP Links inside web pages and when your trying to download drivers, this presents a big problem. I had not tried Chrome since and I guess was holding onto some past issues that were sorted a long time ago.
Plug-ins
There is a handful of things I need a browser to do, over and beyond your normal day to day browsing and if Chrome could not do this, then it had failed at the first hurdle. The first one I use would be Xmarks which sync’s your bookmarks to a central server along with your passwords if required. I had learned that there is now a version for all browsers. I also seen that now by default Chrome can sync your bookmarks to Gmail – so again, easy for me to share my bookmarks around the machines I use.
Adverts
I need to stress how much I hate any form of advertising, be it on the page, a pop up or even worse, inside a video I am watching. With Adblock plus on Firefox, I managed to block 99% of the adverts out there in any form and even block some of my own (home made web site adverts). I spotted Adblock+ and various other stuff for Chrome, so it was almost good to go.
Using Chrome
So we set off on our little adventure and started to use Chrome for everything that I do and this includes visiting Live Streams (Ustream / Justin.TV), watching YouTube and various other sites. The first problem was trying to watch Achieves on Justin made the browser crash as before – so this problem lay with Justin and not with what browser I use.
Watching a live stream and adverts were coming in inside the video but it had blocked the one’s on the page – funny enough these were google adverts! Are we suggesting that Google wont allow you to block there own adverts using there browser? I added the filters in to get the adverts gone but no matter what, they were there.
Pages not loading
Some pages let you do some stuff but the second you try and produce the result – such as Friend or Follow and it just sits there. A lot of pages were I was trying to download files made the thing just look around back to the front page and I struggled to even get some drivers from ATI because of this.
I tried my hardest
I wanted to love it, I wanted to say this was the browser for me and Firefox could be un-installed but eventually I could not stand the pain any longer. I removed Chrome and reverted back to Firefox. Once again I can browse without any adverts anywhere and all the pages work, all the links download as planned.
