I’m now two weeks into my switch to using Chrome as my main browser. How’s it going?

  • The plugins are working really well for me
    • Chromed Bird (the Twitter client) updated soon after I switched, adding tabs for @replies and DMs, which made me a lot happier. There’s a couple of little odditie (clicking “compose tweet” doesn’t shift focus into the text box, for example) but overall I’m very happy.
    • The Gmail Checker also recently updated, giving a really nice preview with delete / archive / mark read buttons right in the plugin. I actually prefer this to FireFox’s Gmail Manager now.
    • Adblock is a bit flakey, but it’s doing a good enough job that I’m not driven totally up the wall.
    • Flashblock is, as always, ace.

One of the only other things that was annoying me for browsing at work was being able to set proxy settings. Chrome generally picks up the IE settings, but I have a couple of exclusions which I’d customised in FireFox but can’t in IE as we’re locked out of the settings. Thankfully, Chrome supports a command line parameter, –proxy-pac-url, which you can point to a Proxy Auto Config file. This allowed me to grab the corporate PAC file, make a few changes, save it to my local disk, and point Chrome at it. Happy days! Clicking on links to my internal Butty Run server no longer results in annoyance :)

At home, I’m using it on Linux, and the experience is largely the same apart from the click-in-url-bar issue. If you’re not familiar with this, then essentially on Windows the default is that clicking in the address bar selects the whole URL, where on Linux it’s not. I understand the arguments from both sides; I’d even agree that on Linux the default is correct; however as someone who switches between both environments, the change is quite jarring. I wish there was a preference to switch this around, but AFAICT there isn’t.

This brings me to the thing I miss most about FireFox. Overall, I’m very impressed with Chrome. It’s much, much, much snappier than Firefox; the startup time in particular is ludicrously fast. The downside is that I feel a little more locked down, a little less able to customise. On FireFox’s about:config page you can change pretty much anything about the way the browser works under-the-hood, but Chrome doesn’t seem to have an equivalent.  As someone who enjoys tinkering, this grates a little. I’m going to stick with Chrome because day-to-day I do find it more usable, but I’ll continue to miss the little bit of extra freedom that FireFox gave me.