I recently upgraded my machine from XP to Windows 7 and in doing so did a full format. To celebrate a clean slate, I decided I would finally give Google Chrome 2.0 a shot and use it for the first two weeks to see if I liked it better than Firefox 3.5. Here are my findings:

Speed: This was my main reason for wanting to switch. I’d heard about Chromes amazing start up speed, and it didn’t disappoint. In my personal testing on an AMD Phenom 9750 2.4 Ghz quad core with 4 GB of RAM, Chrome started about twice as fast as Firefox and loaded pages at about the same rate. While this is only a few seconds shaved off total browsing time, Chrome does feel quite zippy in everything it does.

Adrian Kingsley Hughes from ZDNet has benchmarked Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 and 3.0, Safari 4, Opera 10 (alpha!) and Chrome 2.0 browsers using SunSpider, V8 benchmarks. These are her findings.

I will say this: Chrome needs some major work in rendering flash files. It is slow, and lags. This might be Adobe’s fault, and hopefully they can get their game together. In the end, this category still goes hands down to Chrome.

Overall Feel: Google Chrome is purposefuly minimalistic. I liked this, but it became slightly annoying pressing CTRL + B every time I wanted to open my bookmarks. I think this was intentional. I think they want you to just type in the name of the website into the address bar and it will show you the site. I really don’t work that way, however. I like to see my favorites, and from there I decide which site I want to visit. I will give Chrome props for it’s amazing searching features for history, favorites, or even random webpages. It is tightly integrated with Google. I guess I’m just used to Firefox’s layout though, so I give this one to Firefox.

Expandability: I’ve been putting off using Chrome because I’m absolutely dependent on Adblock Plus. This amazing Firefox add-on takes away any advertisement on the screen. I only realize how many ad’s it actually blocks when I’m forced to use IE on another computer. Well, I figured out that you can setup an ad-blocking proxy on Chrome called Privoxy. A couple tweaks and I was golden, my window no longer cluttered with ugly banners. While Chrome is definitely lacking in the 3rd party extensions and add-ons, I’ll give it a pass. Firefox has been around for years and has a strong developer following. Chrome on the other hand has only been around a couple years and is showing a lot of promise in this area. I’ll give this category to Firefox, but this could turn around in the near future.

Overall: In the end, I used Chrome for a couple weeks and loved it. One thing I didn’t mention is that Chrome makes each tab a seperate process. In doing so, if one tab has problems and crashes for whatever reason, it doesn’t kick you out of the browser completely.This is a cool feature, but I think it’s fairly useless. I rarely, if ever, have pages crash on me, and if they do Firefox saves which pages I had open so I don’t ever lose what I was doing.

I am writing this post using Firefox for one reason: Chromes inability to import passwords from Firefox 3.5 and up. Chrome CAN import anything below 3.5, but this doesn’t help me. I have hundreds of passwords that I don’t remember and depend on the browsers memory to help me out. Because Chrome couldn’t do this, I was forced to go back to Firefox. I will say that if this wasn’t the case, I would make Chrome my default browser due to its upper-hand in the speed arena.