Google Chrome: Cool but Not (Yet) Compelling on Mac
I've been using Google's Chrome browser the past few days as an experiment. (My friends think I experiment too much. I think they're wrong but I'm going to test their hypothesis this week.) It's cool. Slick user experience. Definitely speedier than Firefox on OS X. Not noticeably faster than Safari on Mac, though. And it has a few quirks I don't like.
One thing I really missed during my brief sojourn in ChromeVille was the ability to define a collection of pages as a single set of tabs I could open with one click or use as my default Home. That's trivial in Safari and automagic in Firefox. It turned out to be possible in Chrome but only by editing a snippet of JavaScript and using that bookmarklet as my home page. That felt a bit kludgy to me.
But mostly I'm staying with Safari for now because:
- Firefox has become bloatware. I love all the plugins. And I hate all the plugins. It has become such a dog on my system that I can't use it any more and I can no longer easily figure out why it's so darned slow. I'm talking S-L-O-O-O-O-O-O-W here, people. LIke typing into a text area and then waiting -- no exaggeration -- as long as 45 seconds for the display to catch up with my typing after I've stopped striking keys. Unusable.
- Chrome doesn't offer me any particularly compelling reason to switch and go through all of the re-registering and re-membering logins and passwords (even though it seems to do a half-decent job of importing such info when you install it).
- I have a vague feeling I'm giving too much of my life to the G-men.
Anyone out there on Mac finding really compelling reasons to switch to Chrome?
