Why it's time to dump Chrome for Waterfox

I have held Chrome in high regard ever since I was converted from Firefox some years ago. To me it was radical and beautiful and I thought I had found my perfect match. If it was love then, then divorce is very much on the cards now.

From the early years of Internet Explorer, users wanted something stable and yet responsive. These were painful times where browsers would crash continually, the computer would hang for what seemed like hours and reboots were regular events. Then we had the first semblance of change when I was experimenting with Opera and Firefox. I liked Opera don't get me wrong, but there was just something not quite 100% right with it whether it was the layout or colour palette I do not know.

So I became convinced by Firefox. I used Firefox for many years but was always aware that text didn't seem as bold as later versions of IE which may have been a settings issue on my behalf. But then Chrome came on the scene. It had the crisp boldness that Firefox didn't, it was faster than Firefox and more stable than any other browser. It soon overtook everything.

However, I like many became aware that good things never last. Google's obsession with trying to get every last scrap of information about you and trying to 'all in one' the user with Chrome, Gmail and any other Google product that they can database you into, started to make me feel uneasy. As an engineer, this last few months I have felt a little uneasy about recommending Chrome and Gmail. Gmail targets you with ads whilst I have felt the Chrome experience worse and worse. Finally, I think I have snapped.

I had been having issues with my old Athlon machine running Chrome for some time, but nothing too dramatic. I have however, felt that pages were becoming more and more unresponsive and that crashes were getting more frequent. Roll on this last few months where I have purchased a low-mid range gaming rig, and Chrome has let itself down badly. It may be the latest releases combined with my new spec, but things 'are a'changing' as one grumpy old veteran once said.

Running Chrome on my 64-bit Quad-Core 4170 is like buying a lottery ticket. You're literally crossing your fingers in the hope that you can get through a session and be the lucky winner that can avoid crashes or system failures. Chrome has just become so unstable, so unusable and plain unresponsive that enough is enough. It constantly hangs the computer literally sending Windows into a state of paralysis of which pressing reset is the only remedy. I have given Chrome the benefit of the doubt over the last 6 months, as I see it as something that has well deserved my recommendations to others. But I cannot go on recommending any further. I am currently using Waterfox which is supposedly a 64-bit specialised version of Firefox, so we'll see where that takes me.

But for now, Chrome is on the back burner. It's been a hell of a ride Chromey, but you just ain't cutting it any more!