chrome vs internet explorer

I’ve been using Google Chrome since it first appeared, cool engineering  comic and all. I practically stopped using Internet Explorer at all. Chrome had all these cool things like tabs, and later came the extensions, and web apps, and so on.

But all these extra things were its undoing for me. Whenever I needed to check something on the Internet for work, I’d see the little gmail extension icon with its delicious unread email counter, vying for my attention. Sure, I could disable the extension but what would be the point of that? Disabling those extensions that were there to make my life easier made me wonder what I was getting out of Chrome at all.

My company is another factor. Most of our internal Internet sites, just don’t work very well with Chrome. I even went so far as to install an Internet Explorer extension into Chrome so it could render selected pages in ie. And when I click a link on one of our portals or a sharepoint site, to open a document, Chrome never did the right thing. So, for those sites, I manually switched over to Internet Explorer.

And there’s more. I like using Windows Live. Might not be very trendy but their programs have come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. And I use Office 2010 (the best), and liked that I could link documents up to my Skydrive site. And whilst I could edit my Office documents in the Chrome browser, if I ever needed to do anything more complex in the full Office suite, Chrome didn’t support opening a web document into my local program. So, I was still stuck in the position of not being able to give up Internet Explorer.

Let’s not get started on synchronising bookmarks between the two browsers. If I was going to use both Chrome and Internet Explorer, I would have to keep the bookmarks between the two programs in sync with each other – some how. It’s not straight-forward, and not something you’d want to do on a regular basis.

So I came up with a solution. Microsoft helped make up my mind by releasing Internet Explorer 9.

I stopped using Chrome.

It was a bit weird at first. I felt like I was letting an old friend down. I’d watched Chrome grow up. But, the conflict between using two browsers just wasn’t worth it. So I surrendered. But surrendered to Microsoft (never thought I’d do that).

And I love Internet Explorer 9. It links in beautifully with Windows 7. Looks good, and It’s fast.

No more conflict.