"Begin Again, the Browsers Wars Have . . ."

As a veteran tech-head, I remember well the first browser war between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator was the feature-rich, lightweight, intuitive champ, IE was clunky, slow and had the user interface from hell . . . but in the end, the vastly-improved IE 5 / 6, integration with the Windows operating system and feature bloat eventually killed Netscape.

As a Mac user, I've had the choice between the bundled Apple Safari browser and Mozilla Firefox. While Safari is fast due to tight integration with Mac OS X, boasts the clean clear interface of any Mac program, most of its deeper settings are not readily available to the user -- and far too many web sites just do not work with Safari. Firefox launches very slowly, renders slowly but nicely, has just about the right amount of settings exposure and is a lot more compatible with respect to web pages it will render.

To continue the Star Wars meme . . . "there is another . . ."

And, at first glance, this "other" is pretty damned good.

A couple of years ago, while I was still earning my daily bread by troubleshooting Macs, I downloaded an early beta of Google's "Chrome" web browser. At the time I was singularly unimpressed with it. Chrome was buggier than a roach motel then, so I soldiered on with Safari for work and Firefox for everything else. In my post-Apple life I can count on the extended fingers of a clenched fist how many times I've launched Safari.

After one Firefox crash too many, I downloaded the latest version of Chrome for Mac. The bugs that so annoyed me before were no more. I am very impressed with the rendering speed on even new web pages. I like the tight integration with my favorite general-purpose search engine and I love the low memory footprint I'm seeing in Activity Monitor. Chrome imported my Firefox bookmarks without any fuss or bother.

As a quick "smoke test", I logged several web pages that I use frequently that give me issues with Firefox. I tried a few Facebook games of the variety that sometimes blow up Firefox. The games performed without issues. The World of Warcraft Armory page -- another page that makes heavy use of Flash -- also rendered flawlessly.

My verdict? Firefoxes are cute, but Chrome shines.