It only took me one hour of playing with Google’s new web browser, Chrome, to realize that its just a web browser. I already have 2 web browsers installed on my machine (on good, the other not so much) so why do I need a third? The very short amount of time trialing Chrome was enough to give me a good feel for what Chrome is. To conclude here, I like the browser, but it just doesn’t offer me the same experience I get from Firefox, or the experience I expect from a traditional web browser. Although I have to say, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The things I like about Chrome is the way it manages tabs. Each tab is a new process. This is something I wish my main browser had so I can figure out what is causing it to use all my resources on the machine, and also protect the other pages I have open in case one causes a crash. Another thing I like about Chrome is its speed. It works pretty fast, although after importing my bucket loads of Bookmarks and History, it did effect the way Chrome handled, which could be why I have trouble with Firefox at times.

To be honest, I don’t really feel this as a true competitor in the browser space. I feel this is a spec browser which is to force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and whatever to adopt Google’s features to make the browsers better. Google’s platform is the internet, so pushing out their vision of an ideal browser which enables access to their services makes sense that they want to make it a good experience from both the access program and the web service.

Even though I love Firefox and will continue using it as my primary web browser, I will still keep Chrome on my system. This is a perfect secondary browser for when you just want to quickly access a webpage without waiting for your browser to load and the two dozen tabs that come with it. Just click, wait a second and you’re all ready to zap onto a page. It’s really that fast and simple, which makes it the perfect quick and go browser. Other than that, it’s going to be interesting to see what else they will bring to the table.

For the past week, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9, codename Minefield. I generally wait till the Beta to try the upcoming version of Firefox but due to the fact I was using a temporary computer with no bookmarks or extensions to break, I decided to give it a good test run. I am extremely happy with a lot of the small changes that I came across in the alpha.

The first apparent change is with the way it handles saving password details. It is so much better than currently in Firefox 2. When you log into a website, there is no more pop-up asking you if you want to save the password for this site. Now it comes up with a small, non intrusive alert message underneath the tab bar. It is better in the fact that you it does not require you to choose an option before you can continue logging on and allows you to select an option after you have logged on to the site. This is great if you are not sure what the password is and lets you make sure you have the password correct before you let Firefox save it.

They have also redone the bookmarks system. This is still in early development and was only added to the alpha about a week or two ago. I haven’t had a good play with it considering I started fresh with no bookmarks. I think that this is going to be way better than the current system, much faster too and display more information. Probably the major thing Places is adding to the bookmarking system is tags. The allows you to easily categorize bookmarks and find/access them. One thing I don’t understand is the reason to star webpages. When you star something it doesn’t bookmark it so I don’t really see the point of it. I am sure there is a reason for it, I just haven’t been told it. I can’t wait to see Places evolve through the alpha and betas of Firefox 3.

The address bar does a little more than it does in 2.0. Now when you type in a query in the address bar, it also shows the titles of webpages and searches them for the query as well as parts of sites. For example if you typed in yum9me in the query bar, it will show the sites in your history that have yum9me in the web address and the title of the webpage. This makes it easier go to pages you already have been too but there is also a disadvantage. Lets say you were going back to a site you visited about about pork and you type “por” in the address bar, included with the site about pork will be any site you have been to with porn in the title and in the URL. That is the disadvantage of the improved address bar but lucky this wouldn’t be a problem for me

Finally, one of the things I love the most is quitting the browser. On the even of you quitting, the message that alerts you that you are closing “x” amount of tabs is a lot more useful. Not only does it alert you, it now gives you options. You can either quit the browser, save your session and quit or cancel back you didn’t mean to quit. This is very useful in my opinion because it gives you the option to save the session or not. Sometimes I will want all of these tabs to open again next time I open Firefox and sometimes I might want to start a fresh session next time. Well it now gives you the flexibility to do this easily by deciding when you quit. If you don’t need this, there is always the option to never show this message again. I love how the alpha manages quitting in a much more useful way then before.

Well that is my first impressions of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9. There is more to it than the things I have mentioned, I just can’t remember some of the other features added and a lot of the stuff will be hidden under the hood. I think Firefox 3 is going to be a great product when it gets released sometime next year. I am looking forward to it. The thing I hate the most about having used Alpha 9 was going back to Firefox 3 and missing some of the cool features. It is a bit like how I feel about Vista, there are some small features in Vista that I really miss when going back and using XP. It’s going to be nice to see how Firefox 3 handles the extensions I use as well as how Places works with the 512kb of bookmarks I have in Firefox.

I have been using the Firefox web browser for a long time, from version 1. I remember the days when everyone used Internet Explorer and only web savvy people had Firefox. I remember the days when I would recruit people to join our party, leave the dark side. Real life friends, online friends, random people that we had contacts with, everyone and anyone, we recruited. I love Firefox, it is one of the best things that has happened to the internet.

As you can tell, I am a long time user, but everything I have said so far is irrelevant to the point I am trying to get across here. I believe the search bar is useless. I can’t remember the last time I have used it, could be two months to half a year. You might think that is silly, why would I type google.com or wikipedia.org into the address bar everytime I wanted to search for something, why don’t I just use the search bar. The reason I don’t use the search bar is because there is an easier way to do it.

I suppose most you you have Google as the default search engine in Firefox. Do you switch the search bar to Wikipedia when you want to find something on that? Clicking on the search bar to change the search engine or even type in a query is a waste of time. There is a much more efficient and easier way of doing it. Why wouldn’t you search in half the time it takes you to use the search bar? Why wouldn’t you query Wikipedia in a quarter of the time it takes to use the search bar?

Firefox has something built into it called Quick Searches. This is when you type the search into the address bar and it goes in querys the appropriate page, in the same way it does in the search bar, only its quicker for the user. Typing “google <query>” into the Firefox address bar will do exactly the same as it would if you used Google search in the search bar, just it is much quicker to type that into the address bar of a new window than to click the search bar and type the query. Typing “wp <query>” will do the exact same thing as it would if you searched Wikipedia using the search bar, only much quicker because you don’t have to change the search engine or navigate to the website.

Learning these “shortcuts” will save you a little time searching. But one these shortcuts have become second nature, the search bar becomes useless unless you use a search engine other than Google or search on a different site. For me, I only use Google and Wikipedia, and may others will only use those two sites for searching. I have been trying to find use for the search bar since I no longer need it. I could remove it but then my browser would look odd or I could leave it on Google for aesthetic reasons. I have decided to make it YouTube search. Not that I use YouTube much, let alone search for videos but it gives the search bar a reason to be there, providing functionality I might need that only it can provide. Then again, I can still do without the search bar.