Wizards of Smart

Firefox 3.5 was recently released, and I’m now looking for a new browser. While the plugins are great and seem irreplaceable, the startup time has become atrocious and the memory usage is pretty bad. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to login to http://github.com/ using FF 3.5 at all, and I’m on there quite a bit these days. Not a winning combination.

First I tried Opera. It’s neat, but it’s just too different from what I’m used to, and so many of the extra features just don’t appeal to me. It did seem fast and everything, just not my cup of tea.

So then I tried out Safari. I like Safari 4 quite a lot. Two small quirks: you can’t opt to open to the last browser session automatically—a feature I fell in love with in FF—and the memory usage is worse than FF. It’s almost as bad as Visual Studio. (Both were running near or in the 300k mark.)

Enter Google Chrome. I tried it a few months back but wasn’t very impressed; at least not impressed enough to give up Firefox. With Firefox misbehaving so badly, though, I really feel I have no choice but to give Chrome a second look. And wow! Memory usage is very low, generally in the 30k range. It’s fast. Really fast. Firefox 3.5 says it’s fast, but I don’t think it has anything on Chrome.

So right now, I’m using Chrome. I like it. It continues to grow on me. But I’m curious, have any of you had this experience? What are your thoughts? What are you using?