Over the years, my taste or preference for web browsers has changed as different software companies have released bigger better versions of their browser. In the last 15 years I’ve used more than half a dozen different web browsers and countless versions therein, flip flopping from one to another as they improved but settling on Firefox as my goto guy for the majority of that time.

Like the majority of internet users, my web browser journey started with Internet Explorer from Microsoft in mid 1990’s when it was back at version 4. At the time, I wasn’t aware there were competing products and used it because it came pre-packaged with Windows. My disdain for Internet Explorer began at university, where I began learning about web development and soon realised that its lack of compatibility for web standards was the bain of the internet. Couple an ever growing frustration for needing to apply ‘hacks’ to the web development process with a history of security issues which have plagued the product even to this day and it was enough to begin looking else where.

Else where came in the form of Mozilla, which I have used nearly exclusively since it was released. It offered a better user experience, tabbed browsing, was far more stable than Internet Explorer, web standards compliant and came with a killer feature – a plugin architecture that third party developers could build upon. That plugin architecture for Mozilla and Firefox has been the single greatest thing about it, especially looking at it from a power user and technical users point of view. As Firefox continued to add more and more features to its stable though, the browser began to use more and more memory, was beginning to be slightly less stable and wasn’t as responsive as many users had become acustomed to.

Enter Google Chrome, built from the ground up with performance, low memory consumption, security and fault tolerance in mind – it has rapidly become a favourite among the switchers. Since the beta releases of Google Chrome, the performance of it has been like a drug – once you get a taste for it, it is hard to stop. Like any good addict, I haven’t – and have been using Chrome as my primary browser, falling back to Firefox for certain tasks and very seldom do I bother or need to open Internet Explorer.

To showcase just how fast Google Chrome is, Google have just released a Rube Goldberg inspired video:

It might not be obvious what is going on in that video at full speed, watch the making of Google Chrome Speed Test to get a full appreciation of what I mean when I say fast.

If you haven’t used Google Chrome before, I urge you to give it a try – you’ll be pleasantly surprised.