Thursday, August 19, 2010

The Google Chrome experiment

When Google first announced their Chrome browser, packed with a revamped JavaScript engine (V8) and support for offline web apps, I thought I would give it a spin. The first couple of releases were for Windows and Linux -- no Mac version. Those early versions were a little clunky and appeared to offer no better performance than other popular browsers. So I moved on.

When the Mac version became available, it was a much more polished browser. Another theoretical selling point was that each tab ran as a separate process so one crashed tab would not crash the whole browser. I decided to give Chrome a serious work out on my Mac at home.

Things started out well enough and performance was good. I perused the help and learned some of the short cuts. After about three good weeks, something went wrong. I don't know if it was an update, a growing cache, or what, but it started slowing down. Then, it started having problems loading pages from web sites that worked fine in other browsers. It is possible that it even caused wireless network issues, though that is just speculation at the moment. I need to do some more research to see if the problems were related to Chrome.

For now, I am sticking with Firefox as my main browser on the Mac. I'll come back and try Chrome out after the next major release.