So I just started using Google’s new browser “Chrome” on my MSI netbook.  Just for kicks I went through the process of setting Microsoft’s “Bing” as my search engine.  I figured a little role reversal would be good for both of them.  While not as simple as sifting through a list of search engine bar add-ons as Mozilla’s Fire Fox web listings provide, a quick search is all you need to find the simple instructions you need to set it up.

Now I’m a FF user.  I’ve been one since the earliest release and I’m sure anybody out there who is a diehard FF user can tell you a large part of it is the extensive library of great plugins, add-ons and themes.  Google’s Chrome doesn’t have any of this fleshed out yet, granted it’s still in beta.  While there are themes and plug-ins out there (search-able even on Bing) they are all unofficial, unorganized and generally unappealing.  So for right now FF has a solid place on my main machines as the “default” browser.  On the netbook the position isn’t so certain.

Chrome is definitely better suited to dealing with the limiting factors involved with Netbooks.  The resolution on my MSI Wind is 1024×600, while the width is enough for nearly every web application the height can require a significant amount of finger work when reading an article or review.  To accommodate this limitation I have my Application Bar in Windows XP on auto hide granting me a few extra lines of text.  With FF and no tabs open I have four bars at the top, one of which (the standard MS Windows window bar is completely useless until I want to minimize or close), however with chrome it’s only three.  This comes out roughly to a 23px gain for Chrome.  When I open a new tab that number grows to five in FireFox but stays at three in Chrome and the pixel gain grows to roughly 50.  In addition to two more top bars with tabs open firefox also has a permanent bar on the bottom of the window.  This is quite handy for some plugins, particularly web development and debugging plugins, on the Netbook personal browsing environment this takes away an additional 23px.  This brings our total vertical screen space gain to roughly 72px giving you an inch or more of extra vertical viewing in most browsing situations.  Chrome does have a lower bar when a page requires you to scroll horizontally or when you are downloading files (no extra pop-up window) but the latter can be hidden.  For the Netbook screen environment Google’s Chrome has a significant advantage.

Another item that I find heavily effects the Netbook web experience is memory and resources.  How much space and power the browser is using.  With memory (RAM) FF is eating up 67mb with only my blog open, Chrome takes up a much more modest 23mb.  Now I do have two add-ons with FireFox, most notably and another big Netbook browsing factor is a flash blocker, the other is from AVG (which Chrome “seemingly” doesn’t require).  Here I’m a little conflicted.  Chrome is still in beta and it would be expected that add blockers and flash blockers would become common place soon and definitely after the “beta comes off”.  However the advantage of a flash blocker become obvious when you visit a site that uses allot of flash advertising in the vertical column spaces such as Tom’s Hardware Guide or Gamespot.  Because Flash is a processor intensive media, and Netbooks aren’t known for their processors, hitting one of these adds can slow your scroll to a painful crawl.  Having more available RAM doesn’t alleviate this.

SIDE NOTE: Nvidia’s new Ion platform for Netbooks, incorporating (relative to the platform) a robust gpu, and Adobe working with Nvidia to move towards Flash taking advantage of available GPU power may remove this concern, as may faster more powerful CPUs for Netbooks.  Presently it still remains a concern.

Firefox also has another thing going for it, customization.  You can pull in a number of different buttons (history, bookmarks, dividers, etc) onto your main url bar and move them around however you wish.  You can add a number of different search engines to your search bar and select them quickly.  You also get a divider in your bookmarks to better organize them.  These are all small cosmetic things but they add up to quite a bit of flexibility in personalizing the browser to your own way of using it.

All that said, for now at least I’m actually going with Google’s Chrome (beta) browser and the kicker was the extra inch vertical page space.  While the lack of a flash blocker is a significant annoyance, having the 4-6 extra lines of text, image, interface, whatever, is even harder to give up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Web Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.