After reading a few blogs and praises of Chrome I decided to give it a try. The one reason was that Firefox, my current browser, seems to take ever increasing amount of memory as the day progress and makes my notebook sluggish. This is my experience with Chrome on a Windows XP notebook.
I downloaded Chrome from the official website and followed the instructions for installation. The first glitch was that it hanged while trying to retrieve Firefox passwords and bookmarks, at least that’s what the installer said it was doing. The CPU utilization was upwards of 97% and the memory usage was 16,828k. I decided to kill the process after 10 minutes. Chrome was installed but it failed to get the Firefox user data.
Next, I went to Chrome settings and tried to import the bookmarks and passwords. It did get them but the support for passwords seemed to be a bit patchy. It worked for some sites and didn’t for others. This is some data I collected: -
| Firefox | Chrome | |
|---|---|---|
| Start Time (seconds) | 1.60 | 0.90 |
| Memory Usage (K) | 42,940 | 28,448 |
| Shutdown Time (seconds) | 1.80 | 0.70 |
| Memory Usage after a minute(K) | 43,928 | 28,836 |
I liked the fact that each instance of Chrome ran as a separate process, the memory footprint in smaller and seems to be faster. But, not much data to go by 
This is when Chrome got my PC, I think it was my visit to cricinfo.com (no malice intended, just a fact) when all the trouble started. It could have been some other site but these were the same sites I visit with Firefox. My notebook was infected by both Ad-ware and multiple viruses. This caused a 3 day downtime, not very convenient as works piles on.
In the end, I have decided to go back to Firefox. The good thing which came out of this is that I used my home notebook w/ Linux in office and decided to get a linux desktop for work. I am a new user of Linux as my base OS but have been working on Free BSD based OS (JUNOS) for a few years and use Linux servers for development, so lets see how it goes.
Filed under: google, virus, work Tagged: | chrome, firefox, laptop, linux, virus
