Google Chrome

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> ... the key is that Firefox's entire UI is rendered in a single
> thread, which makes for awful pauses on the fastest of machines (Thunderbird
> can suffer similarly).

  I find it's not so much the UI proper as individual web pages.  A
complex page makes everything (UI and all other pages), quite
sluggish.  A runaway JavaScript is even worse.  And, of course, as has
been noted, there's Flash's penchant for exploding on a regular basis,
taking all of Firefox with it.  Thank $DEITY for Session Manager.

> I don't wind up using Chrome much, but the competition is welcome.

  Indeed.  The best thing to happen for fans of Internet Explorer has
been Firefox.  Microsoft had practically abandoned MSIE, until Firefox
started garnering serious attention.  Suddenly we see development
effort from MSFT we haven't seen in something like a decade.
Competition isn't a panacea, but it's sure working in this case.

  I have some small hope that, this time around, more web developers
will realize that the answer is not to code and test for a selection
of browsers, but to design pages to open standards, and adapt to
change.  Oh, to be sure, there's still way too many "This page best
viewed at 1024x68 using Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180 with Adobe
Flash 9 on a Dell Dimension 4200" logos, but it seems like some have
learned the lesson.  It helps that CSS is a lot more mature now.

  The explosion of mobile browsing also helps.  You can't be a cool
kid if you don't support the iPhone, and it's hard to demand MSIE at
1024x768 there.  So you either code a different page for every type of
cell phone (which, sadly, some sites do), or you accept the idea that
pages can *and should* look different on different browsers.

-- Ben