I switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice about two years ago. At the time it loaded faster, rendered faster, and generally seemed better than Firefox which it replaced. It also downloaded big files faster than any other browser I had.

Over the last few months I have seen Chrome gradually get worse as it upgraded itself – without asking or informing me – another thing I don’t like. When you open lots of tabs it can get really slow, sometimes repainting a page painfully slowly as (I guess) it was page switching from disk. Looking around on the web it seems that the later versions are well known as a memory hog – not such a bad thing if you have vast amounts of ram – a pain if you have a laptop with “only” 4Gb.

So I have abandoned Chrome and returned to Firefox. I will miss some things – like the real-time speeling chucker – but I won’t miss others like sitting waiting for pages to refresh. I will keep an eye on Chrome and see if they return it to the fast, slick browser it used to be. In the meantime I will update this page if I find anything which makes me change my mind again!

UPDATE:  Yes I know Firefox has a spelling checker but it hasn’t worked on my computers for a long time. Turns out that if you are in the UK you have to right-click on a word, add the English UK dictionary, then once it’s added right click on a word again and click Check Spelling. Then it works! Not exactly intuitive but at least it’s there.

UPDATE 2:  And back again!  It’s 2017 and I have switched back to Chrome. Firefox was getting slow again and Chrome seemed to have sorted out most of it’s speed and memory issues. I wish there was something similar to FireFTP for Chrome though – I really like that Firefox Addon.