I realised something very interesting about Chrome recently that hadn’t occured to me until I was installing Adblock Plus in Firefox. It’s not a dealbreaker but still: Chrome will never support decent ad blocking software. Think about it, where does Google get a large chunk of their revenue?

That aside, here’s an exhaustive list of why I want to switch to Chrome:

• Speed.

However, its still missing some features preventing my permanent switch to the web browser on all platforms. In decreasing order of importance:

• Lack of bookmark synchronisation, e.g. Xmarks.
• Lack of (non-alpha) Linux support.
• Lack of Mac support.
• Missing “/” find in page shortcut.
• Inadequate replication of the Firefox search bar.
• Cannot set minimum font size in options.
• Cannot customise toolbar layout (I could save 32px of vertical real estate by having my bookmarks and address bar on same line).

I have to ask: will Chrome just be this decade’s Firefox? Firefox (Phoenix) was touted as a slim, lightning fast, no-nonsense browser. But lately, Firefox has been slow to the point of frustration. This is either due to an intrinsic inefficiency, or caused by the Extensions “feature” which, uncontrolled facilitates user-crafted mega-bloat.