9.13.2008

Browser Mash-Up

Google Chrome was released in beta and I have been using it for a week or so; it is very fast and pretty reliable but it doesn't (and provably will not) have an Ad Block- which by itself makes pages such as MySpace almost unusable. 

IE8 Beta2 is out and it seems pretty cool as well, but I cannot find a real need to use it over Firefox or Chrome. (It also sometimes has problems loading GMail up with native IE8 mode). 

Firefox 3 has been my browser of choice for quite some time (and Firefox 2 before that) but it takes so long just to load up the first page (even for my XP system on an E8400, 4GB RAM with 4x 10k Raptors in RAID0!)

Opera is also an option (Opera Mobile works great on my HTC Touch) but features has 'widgets' that are more like 'gimmicks'; no browser sync, no decent download tools- just weather, calendars, maps and a SimAquarium? It is an Ok browser with some good features (like the 'speed dial') but it looks like it was made in the late 90s.

The deal breaker for all of the browsers (at least in my opinion) is the plug-in support; small things such as PDF Download, Cooliris, IE Tab (for SharePoint/Active-X compatibility) and FoxMarks (and- of course- AdBlock Plus) make Firefox 100x better than every other browser.  (I also loved the Google Browser Sync plugin beyond measure, but it was dropped with Firefox 3 release -I assume as Google had other browser plans).

As it stands now I will be using Firefox until I can find a browser with the speed of Chrome, the compatibility of IE and the plug-in options of Firefox.  Anyone working on this at the moment?  :o)

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