After a couple of days with Chrome, I’ve decided to abandon it. Why? Every time I used it, I always experienced some kind of slowness, delay, or complete freezing. And not just with Chrome. It would lock up my entire machine for several seconds at a time. Now, I’m not working on the latest and greatest hardware, and it’s been several years since this particular machine had a fresh install of XP so it could be something else causing the conflict with Chrome. Nonetheless, it was painful to use on a regular basis.
Does this mean it’s a bad browser. Absolutely not. It’s certainly better than Internet Exploder and when it was working, it seemed to render a little faster than Firefox (perceptual, no hard evidence of this). Chrome’s UI is far better than IE and even a leg up on Firefox (at least the default theme for the Windows version). It will definitely take some wind out of Firefox’s usage numbers.
Until I get a new machine and/or fresh install of the OS, I’m going to stick with Firefox for everyday use. Waiting for my machine to wake up from a Chrome coma while shopping at the Gap is seriously hindering my productivity at work!
Update 1: I just got around to installing Chrome at home and there must be something on my work machine conflicting with Chrome. It’s considerably faster on this machine (AMD Athlon 64×2 4200+ / 2GB Ram / XP SP3) and doesn’t experience the hangs like my work machine does. Very queer. I wish my work machine wasn’t such a turd.
Update 2: I don’t know what exactly Chrome does behind the scenes, but I hear an awful lot hard drive activity when it’s the only application running. Interesting.
