Using Google Chrome, a Web Designer’s Experience, Part 1: The History of My Web Browser
I jumped on the Firefox train as quickly as any other up and coming computer nerd Web Designer hopeful way back in the turn of November, 2004. How wonderful were those days? Blogging was cool, Google didn’t have a sidebar and when I went to the bar with my friends, no one sat on their phone showing me how great the latest app that tracked everything you do everywhere you go was the whole time.
Like everyone else, I had 157 plugins that did nothing particularly relevant and eventually found my particular version of that browser bringing up web pages as slowly as Firefox was quick to crash. I dumped all of the plugins and started focusing in on what the Internet was really for: me to build websites for other people to use it. I started realizing that the world was big and green and wonderful outside, something that I thought faded out with my teenage years. Firefox came out with update after update and still I found the browser crashing, hogging memory, and generally becoming the pain in the processor for which I’d switched from IE in the first place. In 2006, the Pittsburgh Steelers won their 5th Super Bowl championship, yet it was completely eclipsed by the news that I’d finally bought my first Mac and tried Safari a few months later. For various reasons, primarily Safari’s lack of customization (and when you do customize it, will Apple kill all of those customizations with the next release?), I switched back to Firefox.
So for the rest of the first decade of the turn of the century that officially marked the future known as the 2000s, I was back in FF, watching my browser slow down my computer more than Photoshop at a slow foods conference. And then Google Chrome was released for Mac and that gave me the potential to change everything.
I’ve been using Chrome intermittently over the past month, more heavily over the past two weeks, and right here on this very website I’ll be exploring the potential of the browser as it applies to building websites.
Up Next: Pittsburgh Web Design: An Evolution