Sunday 8 May 2011

Shiny like Chrome

Earlier in the week, for reasons that I've not been able to work out, Safari died on me. Clicking bookmarks in the bookmark bar froze the program. Deleting preferences, clearing caches, resetting the application and other suggested fixes didn't fix it.

I've stuck with Safari since it was a beta, and have been happy enough with it - we're only talking about a web browser after all, and it's the content that really counts, not the conduit.

I've had Firefox installed for the odd website that didn't play well with Safari, but in contradiction to what I've just said, I never really liked it much and don't fancy using it all of the time. So I've installed Chrome and I have to say I'm quite happy with it. Rather than trying to import settings and bookmarks from my sick version of Safari I started at scratch.

The first thing I set up was the Save to Delicious bookmarklet, because I store most of my bookmarks there and just use what I can fit in the bookmarks bar locally. (Delicious is great, and seems to have a better future now that Yahoo! have sold it. If you've never looked into Delicious, you should). Then I added extensions for bit.ly and Evernote. I don't like the default setting of new tabs opening next to the current one, instead I want to open at the end of the tab bar, like Safari, and there's an extension for that too.

I subscribe to one or two RSS feeds, and although they're all in Google Reader I don't like that interface and prefer to read them in NetNewsWire. Chrome doesn't seem to have native support for sniffing out feeds and subscribing to them, but a bit of Googling brought me to these instructions and the RSS subscription extension.

And I think that's all the tweaking I've done. What have I missed? What are the extensions you like and use the most?

2 comments:

  1. What was it about Firefox you didn't like?

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  2. Mmmm - that's a tricky one Giles. Like I said, it's just a browser. I think the first version I used, when OS X was more lickable, just didn't look right. I also think I couldn't be bothered finding extensions to make it do what I wanted it to do (I know, I know... I've changed and I'm a ball of contradictions). I still have Firefox installed, and still find it looks a bit heavy.

    I did try Firefox as my default browser for a while, but the extensions I found, like the Delicious one, didn't look or behave like I wanted them too. It was too kludgy, and with extensions coming from here there and everywhere there didn't seem to be a unified approach to doing things.

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