Google Chrome First Impressions

Yet another shot has been fired in the ongoing browser wars. You may or may not know that Google has launched its new browser Google Chrome. I downloaded it yesterday and installed it on two different machines, one running Windows XP Professional and another running Windows Vista Home Premium.

The first thing I noticed about it was the significant increase in the speed of GMail in Chrome. According to a blog post I read, which was one of the things that convinced me to give Chrome a try now rather than wait, Google has done some very serious optimization of their Javascript implementation. Since GMail is an AJax application which makes very heavy use of Javascript, this makes sense and explains the difference in speed vs. Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Firefox is my browser of choice for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the vast array of add-ons available for Firefox, many of which have become integral parts of my daily activities. I don’t know of any add-ons for Chrome yet, but given that it’s open source I expect there will be many very soon.

I’m limiting my use of Chrome to Google applications for now. It’s a bit inconvenient having to have Firefox open at the same time to make use of all its plugins and Roboform (which doesn’t work with Chrome yet, either), but the speed difference in the Google applications is worth it. I fully expect that gap to close quickly as developers port their add-ons to Chrome and create new ones.

One interesting glitch: when I installed Chrome on my XP laptop, Chrome asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks, history, etc. from Firefox. Since Firefox is my default browser, of course I did so.

When I installed Chrome on my Vista laptop, I was only given the choice to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Firefox was nowhere to be seen in the dropdown list. Needless to say, this is an annoyance, but since I’m only using Chrome for Google apps for now anyway, not a show-stopper.

The bottom line: if you like playing with new software or you really want GMail to be faster, download Chrome and check it out. If you want it to replace IE or Firefox, wait a while. Because Chrome is in beta, I expect things to be pretty fluid for a while. I’ll keep you posted on significant news as it happens.

John The Geek

Firefox 3 – Browser Sync is Dead, Long Live Foxmarks!

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day along with approximately 8 million of my closest friends. I installed it on my laptop at work a couple of days ago. My first impression was a dialog box that came up and said that most of the add-ons I’d been using with Firefox 2 no longer worked.

The dialog very helpfully offered to go look for updates for the outdated add-ons and I clicked the button to have it do that. It found a few updates, but not nearly all of them. Once Firefox launched, I went to the Add-ons dialog and found that there were a number of add-ons simply marked “Incompatible with Firefox 3″. My only available option was to uninstall the affected add-ons.

Several of the affected add-ons were ones I’d mentioned earlier in my post on my favorite add-ons for Firefox. The most important one was the Google Browser Sync add-on. This is the add-on I used most since it ran literally every time I ran Firefox on any of my three machines. It was also the most important to me because I didn’t want to have to keep the three machines’ bookmarks synchronized manually!

I went to Google to see what was up with Browser Sync and found after a bit of research that Google has stopped supporting Browser Sync! There will be no Browser Sync for Firefox 3. In the same article, however, was the good news: there’s a bookmark sync tool available for Firefox 3 that actually gets better reviews than GBS.

It’s called Foxmarks and it flat out rocks! You go to http://foxmarks.com, sign up for a free account and install the add-on in Firefox. When setting up your new account, Foxmarks copies your existing bookmarks to your account and keeps any new ones synchronized with the online site.

Now that you have your Foxmarks account, you can set up additional machines quickly and easily. Go to the Firefox add-ons site or Foxmarks and install the Foxmarks add-on. Log in to your account and you’ll be prompted to do one of three things:

• Merge the bookmarks with those on your machine
• Replace the bookmarks on your machine with those on the server
• Replace the server bookmarks with those on your machine

That pretty much covers what you’d want to do, so pick one and go. When Foxmarks is done updating, it goes off into the background and pretty much leaves you alone from then on. Any new or modified bookmarks get updated to the server silently.

When you start up Firefox, the Foxmarks add-on goes out to the Foxmarks server and updates the bookmarks on your machine silently. You don’t get the popup list of the tabs you previously had open as you used to with GBS because Foxmarks doesn’t handle that. Firefox 3 has the ability to “remember” which tabs you had open and just open them again when you start up without asking, if you choose that option.

Obviously, I’m a Foxmarks fan and I highly recommend it to replace Google Browser Sync. You’ll have to anyway when you upgrade to Firefox 3, also recommended, but more on that later.

John The Geek

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