I’m not particularly demanding of my browser. I don’t want to play games in it or make telephone calls or anything else “cutting edge”. I want to check a few web pages at frequent intervals, post a few forum posts and occasionally bookmark a page.

I used to just use IE but a year or so ago switched to Firefox. About 3 or 4 months ago I noticed Firefox becoming really sluggish and chewing heaps of CPU on some web pages that use Flash. I’m no big fan of Flash but it’s hard to avoid so I’d prefer if my browser could cope with it without spiking the CPU and becoming jerky on the UI. Even writing this blog post in WordPress is annoying. The words ocassionally lag behind the typing as Firefox goes away and does some superfulous task. I put up with it fo a while but finally it got to annoying.

About a month ago I switched to Chrome and was pretty impressed. It’s definitely the most usable browser I’ve employed to date. Bookmarking is intuitive. It’s a small thing but with Firefox I find it a pain to classify a bookmark. Anway Chrome was nice but I found that I was often having to click a link wait and then click it again. Initially I put it down to the network but after a few weeks lI began to doubt that. I started opening an alternative browser whenever it happened and the other browser was always able to bring the page up while Chrome was still waiting. I half suspect the problem is that Chrome is not doing a good job with DNS processing but I’m just guessing and can’t be bothered diagnosing.

With IE I don’t have either of the above issues but I do find the UI in general very clunky and always feel a bit less productive when I’m using it.

I guess that leaves Safari and Opera. I think I’ll give Opera a spin.

Update 26 Feb 2011: I tried out Opera 11.01 for two weeks and while it was ok’ish I never really felt comfortable with it. My biggest gripe is the way it caches and load pages. It seems to very aggressively cache images which is a pain when I’m checking a status page with an image graph. I found myself having to click refresh a couple of times and double check the time stamp on the graphs to make sure Opera had actually loaded the latest version. Despite the aggressive caching it seemed slower than the other browsers when loading web sites. The element countdown in the task bar didn’t help as it just focused me on the fact that I was still waiting. A nice calming progress bar or something is better. I found a lot of sites would be rendered as raw unstylised HTML and then a second later the CSS would be applied. It wasn’t a big drama but it just made the browser fell clunky and is not something that happens with IE, Firefox or Chrome.

Back to Chrome.

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