I consider my self reasonably adventurous in the technical side of the world, and have been running Fire Fox for the longest time (actually started with Mozilla before they killed it off). A couple of months ago I tried Google Chrome, a couple of friends swore by it. Yes the normal tech things were reported:
- Fast, WAY fast
- Small
- Lightweight
- One tab wont affect or crash another
So I tried it 
. To be fair I’ve not had any problems with FireFox, but its always interesting to see healthy competition to help software just move forward. On the surface it’s nice, especially for a new browser and I really haven’t loaded up FF browser with many add-ons so it was a reasonable comparison for me (like for like).
The BIG thing I liked actually had nothing at all to do with the browser, Google Gears. This was unsurprisingly installed and enabled by default in Chrome. I read all my RSS feeds with Google Reader, and again unsurprisingly it has Gears support. This gave me the ability to read all my RSS feeds while I’m at the airport without a WiFi connection – brilliant! So last night I cranked up Chrome and clicked the ‘Use offline’ button in Reader. It was working great up to a couple of minutes ago… I accidentally closed the reader tab. Unfortunately this wasnt the ideal time to remember that Chrome doesnt yet have the ‘re-open closed tab’ feature 
. Doh! So now I’m writing this blog in the airport! Did I mention I love Gears, WordPress also has Gears support
So I have to really thank Chrome for opening my eyes to Gears, well really showing the benefits of it. However as far as the browsers I regularly use on my system FF is still the king. Chrome is nice but still a little too raw for my liking.
Next I promise it will be about Clouds!
Gareth