Letter to Google Chrome
I always wanted to use you as my primary browser but felt lazy doing so because you weren’t supporting some of my favorite Firefox extensions. Also, while I know that it is possible to use any search engine from your “smart” address bar, I was more comfortable with the Firefox approach that allowed me to switch search defaults with a click.
My system has a fairly decent configuration – a fast processor and plenty of RAM – but it had become slow over time and hence I had no option but to rebuild the computer. I reinstalled Windows 7, Microsoft Office (their 2010 release is the best ever), Adobe Creative Suite (am still on CS3) and a host of other useful software.
Internet Explorer (with Bing) was installed by default but since IE is still far from awesome, I had to make a choice between Firefox, Opera and you (Google Chrome) as the primary browser. This time, I dumped my good old friend (Firefox) and choose you instead. Feeling happy?
Oh Chrome, you’ve come such a long way since the last time I tried you on a Vista machine (I later upgraded to Windows 7).
You now have a brilliant collection of extensions. You can smartly detect if I am on a foreign-language website and can even translate pages for me. I also love the fact that you can now synchronize bookmarks with my Google Account.
Your address bar is such a time-saver since it delivers search results and calculations as I type. Shhh.. don’t share this with your daddy google.com because I rarely visit his home page anymore.
Your password manager now works so nicely. Though I would like you more if you can give me an option to protect my “saved passwords” with a super-strong Master Password (and not show them to anyone in plain text), the current implementation is also fine as I don’t work on a shared computer.
That said, there are some things that I really don’t like about you my dear Chrome.
For instance, when you are unable to open a page, you immediately put the blame on the site saying the “link is broken” – when I hit refresh (F5) a couple of times, you load the same page without issues. Why?
I use your dad’s DNS server and have also disabled DNS pre-fetching but the problem has not disappeared completely. The pages (or links), that you say are broken, load fine in IE so I am sure the fix has to come from your side.
You consume so much memory but since pretty much every browser does that, I should not be complaining. I still remember the initial days when you would simply display this “Aw, Snap!” message on errors but I don’t remember seeing it even onee in my latest interaction with you. Is it gone?
There’s however one bigger issue that I really wanted you to know – you have completely frozen my Windows 7 computer on at least five occasions leaving me with no option but a force restart. The issue could be due to bad plug-ins or because of buggy / heavy sites but why do you have to bring my entire system down just because of one, possibly bad, tab?
I don’t know if the problem is due to Windows 7 or due to my machine’s existing configuration or something else but it seriously needs a fix. The only good part is that you have always restored web pages from the previous browsing session.
I had this letter in my drafts folder for sometime but when you (Chrome) took my entire system down today again, I thought I’ll finally send it you (after doing a system restart, of course). You have a support page where people can report crashes but it doesn’t work for me as there’re no minidumps on my computer.
I am therefore getting Firefox today and plan to use it as my primary browser again. I will continue to have you on my system, will keep testing your new builds and will keep writing about you on my little tech blog but you may have to sit somewhere between Firefox and IE for now.
Bye! @Wordinvestor
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