From Firefox to Chrome: Why I made the switch

COMMENT

The browser wars are heating up, especially with the introduction of Google's Chrome. But has it got the steam to compete? Stephen Shankland tells why he's jumping aboard

Sorry if it sounds like I'm drinking the Google Kool-Aid here but I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my default browser for the very reason Google's executives said we should: speed.

Years ago, Firefox won me over chiefly with plug-ins, tabbed browsing and some security advantages. But using Chrome removed a bit of friction from the web I hadn't realised was there.

Here's what coaxed me away: Chrome starts way faster than Firefox. Web pages load faster when I type in an address or click a link. The Omnibox - Chrome's combination location bar and search box - often gets me where I want to go at least a keystroke faster and I'm not terribly worried about sending web navigation and search data to Google.

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Individually, a few tenths of a second here or there doesn't make much difference. But it adds up fast. I spend hours per day using the web - not just browsing but also uploading photos, issuing instructions to my bank, editing documents online, and posting comments. As the web gets more complex and more deeply embedded in my life, waiting for it gets more annoying.

I hadn't set out to convert to Chrome. I just wanted to see how well it worked, so I used it to run my personal email while at work. Then I added in reading RSS feeds. After a few weeks, I noticed that I was manually copying web addresses to Chrome and realised my subconscious mind had made its decision. So last week, I set it as my default browser.

After I told Mozilla Foundation chairman Mitchell Baker about my experience, she sounded a bit crestfallen. "We've been increasing our focus on performance for some time. Maybe comments such as yours will increase that," she said.

Faster stripped-down Firefox
Mozilla suggested I try a fresh installation of Firefox, one that's not burdened by those pesky extensions. I hadn't been running a large quantity but I started with a fresh reinstallation of Firefox 3.1 beta 1.

I have to say Firefox picked up the pace a notch. But I compared it again with Chrome on many websites I use daily and a variety of others, and with the exception of Flickr and My Yahoo, I still found Chrome snappier.

Of course, disabling extensions is a shame, given that it's one of Firefox's big advantages. Google has promised an extensions framework at some point, and it's the top-requested feature, with 381 people having starred it as a priority in Google's issue-tracking system for Chrome.

Reinstalling Firefox also reminded me of a feature in the forthcoming Firefox 3.1 that I was happy to leave behind: tab-switching behaviour. I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, and use Ctrl-Tab hundreds of times daily to switch between browser tabs. I loathe the new Firefox mechanism, which switches to your most recently used tab rather than cycling one tab to the right, and showing a miniature preview version of the web page instead of actually switching tabs.

Meanwhile, though, Chrome cycles the way I like, and in another nice move, it opens new tabs immediately to the right of the page I'm reading when I middle-click to open a page in a new tab. That conveniently groups related tasks together.

Off-colour remarks
Here's what's keeping me an active Firefox user, though: Chrome's lack of support for colour profiles.

Most images on the web are encoded with a colour scheme called sRGB but there are others out there including AdobeRGB and Microsoft's scRGB that can show a much broader range of colours.

Apple's Safari was the pioneer for colour management, and Firefox added colour profile support with version 3.0 if users manually enable it. With version 3.1, Firefox applies colour profiles for images that have been tagged with one. As a result, images on my high-gamut monitor at home look fine in Firefox but in Chrome they're hideously garish and oversaturated.

I recognise my colour preference is at odds with Google's performance push. Mozilla programmers found that supporting colour profiles slowed Firefox 20 per cent to 30 per cent, though they reduced that number four per cent to five per cent with testing.

But Google hasn't even got to the stage of evaluating performance effects. "I don't see how any sites could depend on this feature if it's missing/disabled for 90 per cent of users," said Chrome program manager Mark Larson in a response to a request to add colour management to Chrome, referring to the fact that colour management is missing in Internet Explorer and not enabled yet in mainstream Firefox. "I'm all for it, but it's definitely not a release priority."

Other gripes
Here are some other things that annoy me about Chrome.

• There's no plug-in mechanism.
• Bad support for RSS subscription feeds. In Firefox, a site with an RSS feed gets an icon in the address bar and clicking it signs me up for the subscription. In Chrome, I have to hope someone manually put a link on the page.
• When I launch a new window, Chrome never starts it maximised, even if the last window was. This is a bit surprising, given Google's laudable emphasis on showing as much real estate as possible. I always want my browser page maximised.
• Chrome doesn't respect changing monitor sizes well. When I move to a dual-monitor setup, Chrome stomps all over Windows' task bar.
• Selection and copy-paste issues. When I'm selecting text in Chrome, I don't like how the blue selection box spreads wider than the text box. And when text is selected but I missed a few characters, I don't like the inability to use Shift-right arrow keys to extend the selection a bit.

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