Using Chrome
I find myself using the Google Chrome web browser more and more these days. I downloaded it just to have a look, and what was immediately obvious was how fast the darn thing is. It is fast to start up, and fast to load a page. Literally, while my PC is booting into Windows XP, I can start up Chrome and start reading the morning news. My PC will be happily chugging along in the background, starting up all manner of processes, while I’m happily chugging my coffee and reading gamasutra.com. Try THAT with Firefox or Internet Explorer.
The downside of using Chrome though, is that it doesn’t yet have a way to synchronize bookmarks. This is one of the fundamental features which makes Firefox valuable to me – using the Xmarks add-on I have my bookmarks synchronized between my home PC, work PC, and laptop. This ability is as valuable to me as using an Exchange server to keep my email and contacts synchronized. It is just one of those no-brainer things that I don’t want to have to think about.
So for now, I go back and forth between Chrome and Firefox. Which is kind of irritating. Apparently Firefox 3.5 will speed things up, so we’ll see if I get sucked back over to the Firefox camp. And I don’t even want to look at Opera or Safari. I have enough browsers to think about already. 🙂
Install Dropbox on all the PCs, and see if you can get the Chrome bookmarks file to live in it.
Or, just start keeping all your bookmarks at delicious.com, which you should be doing anyway… Then they’re sync across not only machines, but browsers! 🙂
It’s the classic trade-off, isn’t it? You can have it feature-rich, or you can have it small, fast and agile. You can’t have both 🙂
Firefox 3.5 RC3 has just dropped, and I find the javascript performance increase is substantial. At work we have an HTML-based documentation solution that uses javascript for index building and search. Loading the frameset containing that JS used to choke Firefox 3 for several seconds (as in, hourglass cursor, no UI response). Chrome loaded it almost instantly… and 3.5 feels pretty much the same.
Still takes a while to launch, though, especially under OS X.
I use Chrome about 90% of the time now. My IT dept is on an old version of IE, and so I couldn’t use IE7, which forced the switch.
I really like a bunch of Chrome’s features, but I’m still really missing IE7’s RSS reader, esp when coupled with Outlook’s support for RSS feeds. THe workflow with both of them working together was pretty sweet.
I’m with Bret, I just switched over to a system where I put my bookmarks file (for me, a single HTML page I edit, started in the Netscape days – I’m old school) into Dropbox (a great free system, I dread the day when they go out of business) and then point each computer’s Chrome (or any browser) at it. Update the file from anywhere, use it anywhere, and it’s kept private to me. I also use del.icio.us for bookmarks that can be easily categorized (vs. stuff like insurance account login, etc., where I like to organize the info on my bookmarks page) and that I don’t mind being public. Finally, I’ve been using yodlee for tracking almost all my financial accounts. I love free stuff.
Just use the google bookmarks feature attached to your google account and you are good to go. Any time you want to bookmark a website use the convenient javascript button provided on the google bookmarks page (http://www.google.com/bookmarks/).
Regards,
Tam
Chrome is a great browser. It leads me to believe that one day Google will have the webOS figured out and instant on happiness will be finally viable, due to solid state hard drives. I would like Google to support sketch-up in their browser that would be tricked out.
I tried out the suggestions from you all, but it is sure hard to beat hitting control-B and just having all my bookmarks right there! I suppose one of these days I’ll have to embrace the cloud 🙂
You can try chromium, the open source version which has the advanced and among them you have bookmark synchronization using google docs. features and is very stable (or swith to Chrome’s dev channel, but I would suggest to try chromium so you nevertheless have a stable chrome).
You have it here http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/
Just try the latest. In lifehacker.com there is a link to a tool that gets the latest build only if it passed the testing so you always download a working version.
Else just wait a little in a couple of months you’ll surely have it on chrome auto-magically.
Willie.