Bereninga

Lately, I’ve been using Google Chrome, and I don’t think I’ll be going back to using Firefox or Safari for normal everyday-browsing and here’s why:

• Extensions – The are great extensions out there that make life a little bit easier. The cool thing about the extensions on Chrome is that they appear with one click. Great extensions such as Chromed Bird and 1-ClickWeather for Chrome appear as interactive drop-downs. Ubiquity for FireFox almost provided similar functionality in that users can input commands in a pop-up window that was activated by pressing Command + Space Bar. However, “Labs is currently focusing its attention on other experiments”. You can forget about extensions for Safari because none exist. Sadness.
• Speed – Chrome is pretty lightweight compared to FireFox. It barely takes up memory usage. Firefox is a little heavier. What a fat ass. Safari though seems to be just as zippy as Chrome.
• Tab Behavior – Tab behavior on Chrome is pretty sweet. If you close a tab, it returns you to the last active tab. Safari brings you to the next tab on the left of the just-closed tab. (Argh, that means I have to use the mouse/trackpad again!) Also on Safari you navigate through tabs by Command + Shift + { or Command + … nevermind, this is just as annoying to type out as it is to use. There’s no way to navigate through tabs on Safari simply by Command + tab number. Firefox works like Chrome in that you can use Command + Arrow or Command + tab number, but it also suffers from forgetting your last active tab.
• Video Support – Oh, video support on the web. The format war about online video has been raging on lately and what a battle it’s become! Luckily, Chrome came well-prepared! It supports h.264, Theora AND VP8. All the bases have been covered, right? It looks like the others will have to duke it out or copy Chrome.

So why are you NOT using Chrome?

Today, I found out that most Firefox personas suck and here’s how I found out.

Yesterday, Firefox released 3.6.2. I upgraded as usual and was sent to the Firefox Updated page. I finally gave in to trying out the Personas feature and browsed for about half an hour trying to find a theme that was not distracting and looked seamless with the browsers buttons and input fields.

Here are some reasons why I think a lot of the Personas did not look right:

1. The background image(s) and/or colors were too distracting. Do we read websites with photographs as the background? Various colors in the background just make it hard to look for something quickly and easily.
2. The color of the title bar was too bright or makes the window title hard to read. This may be picky, but the title bar is present all the time and is pretty hard to ignore. I tried one theme that made the title bar text black and the title bar background red. Is this really that enjoyable to look at constantly? Seriously?
   
3. The browser buttons didn’t fit with the theme. It just looks strange to have these gray buttons over a natural Persona or something colorful. The buttons should look like they fit into the Persona or at least share colors that are used.

Unfortunately, I really only found one theme that fit the bill: MozillaZine. Thanks to jrocknyc I was able to find a list of some decent themes. MozillaZine was my preferred choice of his ten, but I may go back to using Themes. I just miss the full integration of Themes. Developers were able to customize fonts, tabs and buttons with Themes. Personas unfortunately only change the background.

Think of it like this: what if everything on my website was the same except the background? It would look silly.