Why I Love Google Chrome for the Mac

By Jim on January 6th, 2010

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For the last few years, Firefox has been the only browser I use regularly. I’ve never cheated on it. Oh sure, I’ve had brief flings. I tried my best to really like Safari on my Macs, but it always left me cold. I don’t use Windows enough to have Internet Explorer as my main browser. And none of the Linux browsers, such as Konqueror, floated my boat enough to lure me away from Firefox when I was using one of those operating systems.

Yes, no matter how hard I tried to make things work with other browsers, I always drifted back to Firefox.

Well, no more. As of today, I am dumping Firefox. I have a new love.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome.

Full Speed Ahead with Chrome!
I just installed the beta of Chrome on my Mac and it absolutely screams! The difference between it and poor, chunky Firefox is pretty much night and day. Pages load significantly faster; even media-heavy sites like Facebook, where I play Farmville, are quite zippy.

Google Chrome is giving me a browsergasm! And I love it!

I’ve noticed that even if I keep a ton of tabs open in each window, Chrome seems to use less memory and to manage it much more effectively. Firefox has always been a huge memory pig. I closed Firefox down a little while ago and it had been using about 378MB of memory. I have about the same number of tabs open in a couple of windows in Chrome and it’s only using about 154MB.

What Went Wrong With Firefox?
So where did Firefox go astray? For some reason it seems to have lagged behind in some respects. It’s still uses up ridiculous amounts of memory and loads pages significantly slower than Chrome or even Safari.

I seriously hope that the Firefox developers are taking a good look at both browsers and are figuring out ways to improve their browser’s performance. It simply cannot continue to be as pokey as it is, nor can it continue to consume memory like a whale swallowing plankton.

If a longtime and proud Firefox user—I still have the Firefox 1.0 T-shirt I bought for $20 at a trade show years ago—is switching to Chrome, is Firefox in trouble? Will people abandon it in droves in favor of Chrome, Safari, or some other browser? I sure hope not—but you never know.

Take a look at browser statistics and how they’ve changed over the last few years. Years ago, Internet Explorer ruled the Web browsing roost. These days, Firefox is really closing in. But Chrome is no minor competitor that Firefox can afford to ignore. Firefox could very well find itself in last place if improvements aren’t made to it—and quickly.

Despite my current love of Chrome, I will be rooting for Firefox to be improved. I hate it when any one company gets too much of a particular market, so I want lots of browser choices available. The more competition in browsers, the better off all Web users will be.

So I hope Firefox is buffed up in future releases. If it is, I reserve the right to switch back.

Firefox, I hardly knew ye.

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