I’ve been using Chrome on several different OSes the past few months, and have been recommending it to some other folks. In general, it was faster, did Flash objects much better, and so forth.
Recently I noticed it uses almost twice the resources as Firefox for anything with heavy JScript on the page. That’s not a good sign. It used to be just the opposite a few months ago. I don’t know enough to suggest whether Firefox improved of Chrome got worse, but I suspect the latter.
The latest release (7.0) broke me, though. The developers removed the option for making it ask about cookies on every domain that tries to plant them. Now all you can do is blanket “yes” or “no.” Naturally, a blanket “no” cripples your browser on some very common websites. So you are pretty much forced to say “yes” to all of them.
This is Google doing evil; it’s reducing the user’s control and choices. It’s bad enough I never had the fine-grained control of choosing per site whether to accept session cookies without digging around in the menu system. That trick is a way to pacify those nasty webmasters who want to force you to accept tracking cookies, but now Google is on their side completely. You will accept tracking or you can’t play.
Of course, on Ubuntu and some other distros you can choose the Chromium version, which is the development branch. It still offers that option to set site cookie preferences on the fly. But on Fedora, you have to use an oddball repository, and on RHEL 6 your only option is to build it. I find it hard to understand how such a small executable requires 88MB of source code. I decided it wasn’t worth it.
Google Chrome has gone bad, and I’m not recommending it any more.
