Thursday, November 12, 2009

Firefox is a pig, Chrome is faster and thinner, but doesn't work well with Ultramon or Jira (Rich Text)

For many years I've preferred Firefox over IE, but now Google Chrome comes into the picture and I'm getting fed up with how sometimes my computer doesn't respond as fast as I'd like. Well today I looked at the task manager and Firefox was in the top three apps using up the most memory. So today I decided to do a little browser comparison:






BrowserStartup timeMemory with 5 fav tabs
Firefox20 seconds169 Mb
IE 8.03 seconds93 Mb
Google Chrome3 seconds42 Mb


So it looks like Google Chrome is fast and simple. Nice! Problem is that Chrome doesn't use a normal Windows window. I use Ultramon which includes a couple additional window manipulation icons on every window so I can move windows from one desktop to the other with a single click. With Google Chrome those icons aren't visible, and the "Move to other Monitor" option when right clicking on the title bar on the window doesn't do any thing.

Moving windows from one desktop to the other is a feature I use hundreds of times every day. So moving a Chrome window around is going to be a pain, but I think it might be worth it to have the same things running in my browser with 1/2 to 1/4 of the memory used up.

I've since noticed that Chrome doesn't work well with Jira. A documentation and issues tracking tool. The Rich Text tab doesn't show up in Chrome. And when creating a new jira task, it doesn't respect the dropdown value selected. Jira and Chrome don't work very well together at all. Jira and Confluence I also use predominantly throughout the day, so Chrome right now isn't a complete solution for me! C'mon Mozilla, fix your memory issues, and C'mon Google, get your browser to mature faster!

No comments: