I’ve been using Google Chrome as my main web browser on my home computer, which runs Windows XP. While I will say that I really like it, there are some features I miss from Firefox. I miss my extensions and plugins. That’s the one nice thing about an established browser, even if I do have to add on to it. I have that option. Specifically, I miss the Gmail notifier. I suppose I could just download the one from Google to run in Windows, even when the browser isn’t open, but that’s one more thing running and I like to keep as little running as possible. I also miss Twitterfox, my Twitter client, though I have downloaded Twhirl, which seem to work pretty well, though I find it to be a bit more than I need. I like the simplicity of Twitterfox. Other than that, I don’t really regularly use the other extensions I have installed (web development stuff, FireFTP, etc).
I love the homepage feature of Chrome, showing the most frequently visited pages. I also like the speed. It seems very streamlined and small. I like the multi-threading with a new instance for each tab. That makes buggy sites easy to kill without killing the whole browser. It’s a promising browser. That being said, it can be a little buggy and sluggish at times. For the most part, it’s quick. I like that it uses Webkit, because Gecko just isn’t as standards compliant as I’d like it to be (for instance, my blog looks noticeably better with a Webkit browser than a Gecko browser).
I hope Google keeps up development on Chrome and that it becomes more mainstream with support for extensions or plugins. I wish there was an option to open or save certain files (Quicken files for example want to be downloaded and not opened directly). I like how it uses Windows Media Player as a plugin right inside the browser. It could be a real contender and it’s kind of fun to have browser wars starting up again. Now if only they’d release a Mac version (as I type this in Firefox on my MacBook Pro).