Google Chrome

[Michael McNamara]

I've been recovering for the past few days from surgery (perhaps I'll tell that story sometime) and I had some time to play around with Google Chrome. I'm impressed with the general speed of the browser and it's memory footprint on my Windows XP laptop.

I'll be the first to admit that I have a LOT of add-ons and plugins installed into Firefox that are probably doing it a dis-service in both categories I mentioned above.

Anyone else have any comments about Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc?

Cheers!

[modestgeek]

I've installed it on three of my day to day computers. I've tried to give it a chance but I can't give up my addons for firefox. Some of them are being ported over to Chrome but the majority of them have not. I might use chrome a couple times a week for internal sites I've setup. However, there is no way you'll catch me on the web without noscript and adblock enabled.

[Michael McNamara]

I can't stand being sites that SPAM ads all over the place but it can have a drastic affect when the majority of your readers/viewers are running adblockers.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars

Cheers!

[tbigby]

I'm a big fan of Opera, been using it since 2003 now. Chrome looks quite nice but I don't notice it being much faster than Opera, which just has everything I need built in.

Not so much on the ads, but Google Analytics- we did a report on the web proxy recently to find that google-analytics.com was the number 17 top traffic site so far that month, pushing through I think 1.1GB of traffic just in 18 days or so. Luckily, we're on KAREN (NZ high speed research and education network) and peered to Internet2 so Google traffic is free for us. Otherwise we would have been paying quite a reasonable amount for international traffic just for Google Analytics. Gives you something to think about!

[Michael McNamara]

@tbigby

I like Opera as well but just never got the time to really explore it and/or adopt it.

That had to be a really big Internet pipe if you were pulling 1.1GB of traffic from Google Analytics. Let's remember that Google Analytics is just a few JavaScripts and is essentially a few hundred bytes of text. A more telling statistic would have been what percentage of overall traffic did Google Analytics account for? I would guess it was less than 10% easy. What it does tell you is that there are a LOT of people using Google Analytics for Internet traffic trending/reporting.