After reading about the new Google browser, Google Chrome, I decided to try it out and see for myself how it compared with Firefox and IE.
Initially I was impressed by its clean interface and its homepage feature which displays thumbnails of the websites you use most. It even imported my Firefox bookmarks neatly - although I later found out this process had broken various things in firefox. Let me explain...
The next day, with Firefox still my default browser, I was browsing around (I forgot I had Chrome installed), when I realised that several things in Firefox were behaving strangely. See the screen capture of firefox below:
- Pretty much the whole of the firefox bookmarks features were now broken and I feared all my bookmarks had been deleted. My firefox bookmarks toolbar was suddenly empty (this had all my RSS feeds on, and my favourite websites) and the bookmarks menu was empty. I'd also lost the ability to add any new bookmarks and couldn't use the "manage bookmarks" feature either. Very annoying.
- The address bar was behaving strangely. If I typed "bbc.co.uk", it would normally redirect me to the full address ("http://www.bbc.co.uk/") but now, for some reason, the address bar didn't change, ever, even if I clicked my way off the BBC website and onto another site. It still had "bbc.co.uk" in the address bar, exactly as I typed it.
- The icon that indicates that a page is loading was continually telling me it was loading something, even when it had clearly finished loading.
All of this happened straight after I installed Google Chrome Beta, and imported my bookmarks from Firefox. I have now uninstalled Google Chrome permanently, and had to reinstall Firefox to fix what Chrome had broken, and am going to stick to Firefox until I'm sure that Chrome is more stable. Here is a picture of Firefox, reinstalled, and back to it's fully working state:
I'm sure Google Chrome has many advantages - but I'm going to wait a while until I find out what they are!
By the way, I'm posting this complaint using Firefox 3 - go and download it now if you haven't already :-)