This sounds harsh.  Especially when referring to the team that helped the Internet break free of the yoke that was Internet Explorer.  These guys deserve better.

Andy Grove (András Gróf, to those of us who speak Hungarian), formerly the CEO of Intel, once wrote in his seminal work “Only the Paranoid Survive”, that in technology, established companies, organizations and standards only get overthrown when something that better by a factor of 10 arrives on the scene. 

Since Google Chrome browser arrived on the scene in 2008, it has been relentlessly getting better.  The team has been fixing little issues and pumping out performance improvements, culminating in a browser that is simply awesome and a programming Tour de Force.  At this point in time, it is 10x vs. any other browser.

chrometop

In my completely unscientific benchmark, conducted on my middle of the road laptop with Windows XP tablet edition, Chrome blew away all the competitors

Browser Cold Startup Time Warm Startup Time Feels Like
Internet Explorer 7 3 seconds Under a second Why even bother
Mozilla Firefox 3 13 seconds 1 second Sluggish
Google Chrome 1 1.5 second Instant Super snappy
Notepad Under a second Instant Me like

Unlike me, my 9 year old son, unbounded by the nostalgia, adopted Chrome immediately after the release.  For me, stuck in my ways, it took a bit longer.  I fretted about the lack of Chrome add-ons, wondering what I am going to do without all the Firefox extensions.  No matter, it turns out, I don’t really use any of them on a regular basis, except for when I need to use them, like when I am debugging web pages.  Chrome feels like a no-compromise browser, really fast, really made for one purpose and one purpose only - browsing.  It’s architecture of separating all the tabs and plug-ins into separate process jobs really works well, particularly when some Flash or Java page crashes.

So, unfair as it is, I pretty much ditched Firefox in favor of Chrome.  The only time I actually use Firefox is when I encounter a site that won’t work in Chrome.  Kind of like a few years ago, I would only use IE when a site wouldn’t work in Firefox. 

Firefox has been great to me all these years and I feel like I am cheating on it.  I feel like I am ungrateful.