Back in 2009 I wrote about Google’s new browser when it hit the virtual shelves. It was faster then the IE and the Firefox versions available at the time, and had that nice lightweight feel, supported by the fact it fit nicely into your user profile. This last week, I’ve been giving some serious thought to making it my default.

I know some might think that’s simply me being a little late to the party, but I like to give as many browsers as possible a good try (not simply loading a few pages and making a decision). Like phones, I believe you can’t truly know a browsers potential until you’ve made it your primary for quite some time, using it in all situations you would expect to find over the web.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed using Chrome (even while writing this, an unfortunately configured virtual machine caused a complete crash\reboot, Chrome saved it all!), and I’ve on top of that, Opera has been causing many problems.

Comparing the memory\CPU usage between Chrome and Opera shows Chrome comes out a little better, but not by much - however stability is the key for me. Opera spends too long loading, it occasionally hangs while crunching through a particularly large part of JavaScript, or even runs away with memory usage until the system grinds to a halt. After dealing with none of these things in Chrome, this may be my new home (hey, that rhymes Marge and you know it does!)

I’m not sure about this sync stuff that Google practically force on you, I can see the advantages, but the obvious problem being that my work browser and home browser have two very different sets of bookmarks, personal bars, form data and all kinds of add-ons. There only seems to be one way to profile Chrome, which is a little disappointing, as the last thing I want to see is work related stuff on my home PC.

Still, after coming into contact with almost ever browser on a daily basis, Chrome is going to be my mini 2013 experiment, Opera will remain on standby… for now.

	Posted January 11, 2013
	Written by John Payne