When in Chrome, do as the Chrome-ans do

Reading about Courgette made the Hatter finally polish his installation of Google Chrome (which helpfully autoupdated itself) and resign himself to begin using it.

Why would the Hatter consider giving up his Firefox for the new tool of the Web Overlords? Firefox has been getting a bit unwieldy, and eating up too much memory these days. So what's new about the memory footprint, you ask? True, that's a sin Firefox has been guilty of since forever, but it has got worse recently. There are limits to the Hatter's patience, and (virtual) memory.

Chrome is fast and feels much more responsive than Firefox. The JavaScript engine is supposedly much faster, and does feel marginally faster. It seems to render all the pages I frequent well enough. So far so good.

There are a few minuses, though. For example:

• There is no working extensions system, and the Hatter needs Greasemonkey and Adblock and all those other scripts he's cooked up to make his life on the web a bit easier. Chrome is working on a scripting and extension system, which we will have to look at. Perhaps I should look at their dev channel. Incidentally, ads on web sites seem to have got less intrusive since when I bid goodbye to them with Adblock a few years ago.
• Proxy management is not quite as flexible - partly related to the previous issue, since Firefox implements that through an extension. However, the equivalent of foxyproxy should be part of basic browser functionality now. Please, can we have that, Chrome?
• Doesn't work on Linux yet, so I can use it only on my work computer. There is a dev channel Linux build which I must try out. Perhaps I will try porting my scripts as well. I can live without Adblock for a while.

Most of these issues will be fixed, and the path away from Firefox is becoming clearer. It's going to take some more time before I switch my default browser, but it will happen.

Inevitability has a strange, but vaguely familiar flavour.