Posted by Kromey at 2:21pm May 13 '13I switched to it from Firefox because at the time Firefox's long-standing memory leak issue was reaching a new peak and I could no longer leave my dozen+ tabs open for the entire workday, I'd be forced to restart my browser at least a couple of times a day, which was highly obnoxious because at the time Firefox was also really slow to launch!
Chrome has (or at least had) a smaller footprint to begin with, and no memory leak to speak of. And clicking the button brought the browser right up, almost faster than launching Notepad! I also fell instantly in love with the minimalist UI (which both Firefox and IE have subsequently sought to emulate). As for the loss of Firebug, I found that for most of what I was using it for anyway Chrome's built-in developer tools was plenty adequate.
Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine was a big draw to me as well, especially as I have long believed that JavaScript gets an unfair rap and is more than capable of delivering powerful experiences easily the rival of anything Flash can do. And, Chrome just renders and displays pages faster. I literally did side-by-side comparisons of several of my most-commonly used websites, and in more than half there was a noticeable delay between Chrome displaying the page, and Firefox displaying it.
I also love the built-in bookmark synchronization. Sure, there were Firefox extensions for that, but none of them seemed to quite work all that great, were never fully integrated into the browser (most of them required their own bookmark folder to work and ignored bookmarks outside of it), and always required another account and sign-in; Chrome's is built right into the browser, and uses my existing Gmail account -- how much more simple could it get?
For a long time I was using both browsers -- Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Linux -- but once I got around to installing Chrome on my Ubuntu computer I was a complete convert.
I understand Firefox has wrangled their memory leak problem into some semblance of control (for now, at least), and sped up their launch time. Still, I see nothing over there to warrant me switching back.
Google Chrome - Kromey