For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.
Firefox is a remarkable piece of software, and it has been a massive success by any measure. It was around before and during Netscape's IPO, which marked the start of the IPO-crazy dot-com era. I then watched as it declined as a company, turning its flagship product (Firefox) into an open-source project before disappearing.
I used Firefox from its first pre-release versions and have been a loyal user ever since. This was not only because Firefox generally adhered to and promoted standards, but also because of the wide variety of plugins and extensions available for it. As a Web developer, I found that a combination of plugins—from Firebug to the aptly named Web developer to Tamper Data—gave me enormous power and flexibility when developing, debugging and working on Web applications.
During the past year, I've discovered that a very large number of non-techies have switched browsers. But, they haven't been switching to Firefox. Rather, they've been switching to Chrome, a relatively new browser whose development is sponsored by Google. I've certainly used Chrome through the years, and I've generally been impressed by its abilities. But for a long time, some combination of nostalgia and comfort with Firefox's tools kept me from switching.
Well, no more. As of recently, Google Chrome has become my browser of choice. In this article, I describe a bit about Chrome and why I've switched, both for personal use and browsing, and in my Web development work. In a future article, I'll explain how to write extensions for Chrome. One of the nice things about Chrome is that writing extensions is extremely easy and exclusively uses Web technologies (for example HTML, CSS and JavaScript).
I should make it clear before I continue that Chrome is not an open-source product. It is free-as-in-beer, but it isn't released under an open-source license. That said, there are several reasons why open-source advocates should take a look at Chrome. First, it is rapidly growing in popularity, with many developers and users alike adopting it. Just as my clients expect that I'll test Web applications against IE, they now expect that I'll test applications against Chrome. If you aren't including Chrome in your testing, you might be missing some issues in your site's design or functionality.
