Sunday, 22 July 2012

Why I'll stop using Google's Chrome browser - problems with Chrome






For a while I've been trying Google's free Chrome browser, but I'm now about to give up up. As someone who uses tons of tabs, and has them reopen on each bootup, Chrome's just not manageable.

Here's why - a litany of problems and issues which, unfortunately, I just can't waste any more time trying to fix.

1. No "most recently-used" tab switching (or MRU) as standard. It's the only way to implement switching, in my view, especially for "power users" who have lots of tabs open. Yes, there's MRU Tabs and Recent Tabs, but, especially when I've got lots of tabs open, they're nowhere near as powerful as TabMixPlus, which is my single most essential add-on for Firefox (and I regularly donate). And I want to use Ctrl-Tab for switching, not Ctrl-q! This is the biggest, biggest bugbear for me.

2. Crashing or freezing my entire Windows 7 system when trying to open locations or, especially, when close Chrome, often because of the Flash plug-in "not responding". Yes, I've tried disabling Google's own Flash player plug-in, then disabling Adobe's plug-in, but neither worked. I ended up disabling both to stop Chrome making my PC unusable whenever I tried to shut down. And if I need Flash for a particular webpage, I just view it in Firefox, IE or Opera. (I haven't tried reinstalling Chrome, as I didn't want to waste any more time on this.) Even without Flash, Chrome often still takes ages to open a webpage.

Tip: if you disable all versions of Flash in Chrome, it may come back whenever you update Flash generally, which you ought to do for security reasons. So after updating Flash, go back into Chrome plugins and disable Flash again.

3. Sometimes blanking out my webpages after I've gone offline. If I've disabled my internet connection, and yes I do that if I'm leaving the computer for a while, or if I've put the computer in sleep mode then wake it up, often my Chrome pages are completely blank. Firefox and IE etc don't do that, they display the same pages as before perfectly well, why Chrome does I don't know. Yes I have the Reload All Tabs extension, but sometimes it doesn't work and I don't have time to reload every page individually (which does work). "Waiting for cache" is another fun way to blank out my webpages and test the patience.

4. Here's another way Chrome often goes Nyah and refuses to show me many or indeed sometimes any webpages:

"The server at tech.slashdot.org can't be found because the DNS look-up failed."

(That happens even when Firefox, IE and Thunderbird are working fine, so it's obviously not my internet connection or my ISP's DNS servers that were up the spout.)

5. Using up way too much memory on my Windows 7 64-bit computer with 8 GB RAM. I'm talking up to 196 MB per tab in some cases! Firefox 12 uses far less memory, with many more tabs.

So yes, I'm exporting my Chrome sessions and history so I can access my important recent webpages in Firefox, and giving up on Chrome now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you are working on Windows, have a look on
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ctrl%2Btab-mru/ialfjajikhdldpgcfglgndennidgkhik
for MRU tab switching