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The browser of my choice for a number of years now had always been Firefox. It was snappy, fast and always loaded the pages much quicker than it's nemesis, Internet Explorer.
The vast array of addons available also made it a much more attractive alternative to IE too, and together with the fact it was considered a safer browser than IE meant for those of us who tried FF, most loved it and stuck with it.
However, over the past year or so, I've tried out Chrome now and again and whilst it seemed obviously quicker, it wasn't quick enough to warrant me dumping my ole faithful FF. Oh no, I wasn't giving up on my friend that easily. Also, the addon support was pretty poor and for me, I can't operate properly without certain addons and so the decision to stick with FF was a particularly easy one in the past.
But recently, I gave Chrome another whirl. Was it just me or did it seem even faster than before?. I checked out the available extensions for Chrome and we now have a massive database of tools to cover every eventuality, even the tools I rely upon to carry out my day to day activities.
Hmmm, wonder if I should stick with Chrome for another while I thought ... so I did, and haven't looked back since.
The strange thing is, having used Chrome for a week or so now, I've came to realise just how SLOW Firefox actually was. I had thought about performing a couple of benchmarks against Chrome, FF and Internet Explorer, and even Maxthon, but I realise that my computer most probably isn't the best setup in the world to perform benchmarks as there is often too much going on to conclude reliable results so instead I'm using my own observations.
Chrome starts up in a flash, it takes literally something like 2 seconds from the minute I start the browser to load freewarebb fully - and that's from a cold start (i.e. after booting up the computer) - if I close Chrome down and then start it up again, it's just silly how fast it loads!. Firefox, on the other hand, hands around for a couple of seconds after it's started and then begins loading the site - in total, a wait time of around 4-5 seconds on a good day, from a cold start it's really anyone's guess when it will kick in!.
Even performing administrative tasks in Chrome is a breeze, compared to FF.
Browsing between pages is made much faster in Chrome, largely thanks to it's caching functions and in particular the fact it "pre-caches" DNS. This means whenever a page loads in Chrome, it looks at the links found within the page and cleverly grabs some of the DNS information needed from those links so when you actually click on them, the work has already been done and there is very little wait time for the browser to go figuring things out whilst you wait. We are literally only talking a matter of a second or so or even less for a browser to do something like this, but consider this scenario - you browse a web page ordinarily and you are about to click a link on that site or page, when you click that link you may have to wait for a DNS lookup if it takes you outside the domain you are already on. Normally, this is quite a fast process and you wouldn't really see any delay. But if you're computer is already doing something or you are downloading, uploading, or whatever else, then chances are the request for that other page could be held up whilst your browser fights for some resources. Using chrome, the caching facility has probably already taken care of looking up the info it needs and so when you click the link there is nothing to fight for, it simply loads the page because it already has the information it needs !!.
It is, admittedly, a little more involved and complicated than my explanation, and admittedly it doesn't always pan out the way it should, but since I've been using Chrome I've definitely increased my productivity considerably by not having wait for pages to load and especially when performing updates to our downloads the worst thing for me was waiting for the update to go through and just watching the timer tick along - with Chrome there is barely any waiting around now, I hit edit, make the changes and submit, boom! onto the next update.
Don't just take my word for it, give it a whirl yourself - it's not often I recommend a particular download, especially being from a corporate monster such as Google, but this browser has helped me in my daily routine - maybe it can do the same for you guys
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