Chrome vs Firefox – Why I Switched

I have been an avid Firefox user for several years.  And I wouldn’t have even looked at Chrome (despite being a Google girl) except it seems every update of Firefox brings new problems.  After the last update I ended up having to remove all my extensions just to get it to work without crashing.  And then, soon after,  it developed some sort of ghost that seems to render download links useless. It started with Google – everything I tried to download had a bizarre name and .part extension, and then it seemed I couldn’t download any file from any site.  After some research that yielded zero results, I have just struggled with the issue losing a lot of time and growing grayer by the day.  Not pretty.  Whenever I needed to download something I would open up Chrome and do it there.  Heinous, I know – but I just wasn’t ready to give up my familiar FF toolbar.

They fixed the Bookmark Manager (for Macs)

Besides I had tried Chrome when I first installed it – I have a Mac and several months ago the book manager was non-existent.  Tonight though, while downloading a PDF, I was fooling around, and wahlah – a bookmark manager!  And a very nice intuitive one as well.

Snappy Extensions

So I thought, why not – lets go check Google Chrome extensions - is there anything to replace Twitbin I wondered?  And while I didn’t find an exactly perfect replacement (I like the sidebar feature rather than the popup) Chowerty turned out to be a usable option.  Okay, not a bad start.

As I started to look for and add other needed extensions I was quite taken by how fast you could add extension without restarting.  Literally – 3-5 seconds to add an extension and start using it. When I was adding FireFox extensions I remember it was hours of research.  Some things worked, some didn’t.  This time within 30 minutes I had found, installed and understood how to use every extension I needed. In short.  User friendly to the max.

Bonus is nothing is buggy and everything seems compatible.

Here are some of my favorites:

Google GMail Checker Plus - Now this is awesome.  Not just does it tell me how many are in my inbox unread, but I can manage my mail through the popup.  I expect this to be quite a timesaver.  Again, it is probably available for FF, but it is the ease at which I found it, installed it, and started using it that blew me away.

Google Docs – Like in Google Mail I can actually search and find docs in the popup window.  In my FF toolbar it was just a link to my Docs home.

Chrome SEO - for designers and developers – or the business owner that is avid about their site’s competitiveness, this is quite the tool.  Get stats on any page you are on – how many pages are indexed by search engines, backlinks and much more.  QUITE NIFTY.

Incredible Start Page - very nice organization of the home page with a custom sticky note, easy management of favorite links and just a nice interface.  Fast loading, too.

Note Anywhere – sticky note any page you are on for later review.  Just about the coolest thing I’ve seen in awhile.  Course maybe I don’t get out much…

Webpage Screenshot – gets a screenshot of the whole page – not just the viewable area.

Webdesigners, there is even more, so be sure to check out Geekers Magazine Top 10 Best Google Chrome Extensions for Web Designers, & Graphic Alerts 15 Must Haves – or just do a Google search and you’ll find plenty of folks chiming in on their favorites.

The Best For Last – It Works

Doing some research for this post I stumbled upon two sites that had some script that killed the page load.  If it had been FF I would have watched the spinning wheel for 10 minutes until I finally gave up and rebooted my computer.  On Chrome within a few seconds I got a happy nonresponsive warning and it actually let me push the button to kill the page!  Happy camper am I.

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