Migrating to Google Chrome – My Rare Praise to Google

If you’ve been reading Profy for a while, you probably know that Google is hardly my favorite company because of its dubious practices in user privacy as well as its ambitions of ruling the world one day (which I am fairly certain is exactly the intention for the internet giant). I guess this introduction shows that Google will hardly ever get a positive review from me unless it truly deserves one – and since today it does deserve some praise, I think it’s only fair to publish one because I have a good reason: I migrated to Google Chrome browser yesterday after using Firefox for years and I am extremely happy about this decision.

Why migrating at all? Well, at one moment recently I have noticed that my computer is running slow despite of being quite new and having a good 4 GB of RAM on board. Checking Windows processes quickly revealed the three main applications to blame: Firefox (it consumed almost 200 MB for about 10 tabs), Twhirl that I used for Twitter updates, and my desktop RSS reading application. Of course there were other apps that were not web-related (like Microsoft Office) and could not be easily replaced and were essential for my life so I did not consider doing anything about them. But the above three could easily be replaced by other tools that demonstrated a promise of making my life easier without being so memory-hungry.

The steps involved were obvious:

Uninstall the desktop reader that had a habit of downloading full texts of all the hundreds of feeds I’m subscribed to and actually storing them

Migrate everything from Firefox to Chrome to test if I will be able to actually use it as my default browser

Try to find a browser extension to use Twitter without using any specific desktop application

Return to good old Google Reader for reading and find a way to get desktop notifications from it to quickly get updates of the most important feeds

So in under 2 days I have achieved all the goals though I have to admit that one of them is only achieved partly as I still have not found any good way for Google Reader to display popup notifications as the available extensions for Chrome only show the number of unread items instead of actually displaying the unread items’ titles when they arrive – something I love in desktop feed readers. My hopes are now with Growl for Windows that has already enabled support for Google Reader on Firefox (actually it does not work for me so it makes it less reasons to switch back to Mozilla) and hopefully will add something for native support of the popular feed reader soon. Another option could be developers from Google turning their current Chrome extension into a more full-featured one with notifications and plenty of settings as for now it is pretty basic though since the extension is very new, it probably has a chance of updating soon. In everything else I am more than happy about Chrome for now.

At that when Chrome was initially launched, I wrote quite a negative review – but not for the browser itself because reviewing a browser needed some more lengthy testing, instead I commented on the huge hype Google initiated around their newly-born browser. That post received more than a hundred of comments from both parties – people supporting Chrome out of their love to Google in general and people criticizing Chrome for lack of extensions out of their love to Mozilla Firefox. Since then I have kept Chrome installed on my PC to use it now and then for some things I wanted to do in another browser window outside of Firefox. At that I also have Internet Explorer and Safari on this machine for exactly the same purpose so I won’t claim that I’ve actually monitored Chrome progress closely other than reading what other bloggers had to say about it and sometimes ask my husband (a huge Google fan and probably the only Nexus One owner in this city) for his opinion out of general geeky curiosity.

But this latest Firefox misbehave and visible slowness when compared to Chrome (I did use it from time to time, after all) finally made me make the decision so I imported all my bookmarks and settings from Firefox to Chrome, copied the tabs from the opened session and assigned Chrome as my default browser. Yesterday I was prepared to admit this would only be temporary yet today I am quite certain Chrome role will last.

The most usual concern that is discussed when comparing Chrome to Firefox is lack of extensions while many people have a habit of using some Firefox add-ons that they can’t live without – and Chrome extension gallery is not as extensive yet. To me this was not even a concern because over the years I’ve been using Firefox I have not found any extensions that I truly could not live without so I did not have to break any chains.

But imagine my surprise when I realized today that over these last two days I’ve been using browser extensions (on Chrome, I mean) more than I’ve been ever doing on Firefox! The thing is that I decided to install extensions for Facebook and for Twitter (you do remember my initial intention to replace Twhirl – no offence to its owners in Seesmic but it has not been getting tons of their attention as they concentrate on their flagship products which is a correct policy but one that is not getting Twhirl any better, of course). The Facebook extension I’ve selected is clean and easy to use so I do enjoy checking my wall and friends feed – and do it more frequently than I normally do.

But the Twitter one – named Chromed Bird – is absolutely marvelous and I still have not found anything I’d want it to do that it could not manage. It is absolutely customizable and can bug you with new tweets from specific lists or from your entire timeline or notify you about mentions only – or it can keep silent depending on what you want it to do. In fact, having this extension I have no reasons to install any new desktop application specifically for Twitter so why doing that?

My attempts with Google Reader notification have failed for now because most extensions only show the number of unread items and why would I want to know that I have more than 1,000 unread items? My habit is to have a popup displayed every now and then when feeds from a certain folder(s) have a new item along with titles of a few items. True, this can be noisy but this is how I have grown accustomed to get most of my news – briefly and without any special efforts, right when I work on anything I might be working on at any given moment. But since I have noticed many developers are working on tons of Google Reader extensions, my wish will most certainly come true pretty soon so this is not even something I want to be concerned about.

My only major concern is actually not in the functionality field as Chrome runs fast and is lean enough. In fact, it has not failed once for now which was something I was unhappy about in its beta period. For now it seems to be a reliable and fast browser that I really have no reasons to complain about. The only thing that bothers me is connected to its current lack of popularity. It is obvious that right now the vast majority of web developers do not put Chrome on the first place in their list of priorities when building their applications. And this is particularly true for various closed corporate applications – when I visited two such internal applications created by my customers for their internal use I quickly realized Chrome was not welcomed there as I was advised to use one of the recommended browsers.

This is somewhat inconvenient because for such applications I will need to open a new browser instead of staying in my default one. But given that I personally only use such applications rarely, it does not sound like too much of a sacrifice. Besides, I have a feeling that the future is very optimistic for Chrome as its market share will inevitably grow with time – and the example of me being stubborn in trying not to use Google applications whenever I can avoid them finally migrating to Chrome after all definitely proves that there will be more such users still. And the higher the market share, the more extensions and the more web developers finally noticing Chrome and adding it to their lists of recommended browsers. After all, Google will need to make its browser number one to rule the world.