Every once in a while, I get antsy about how I do the things I do and shake things up to see if something better rises to the surface. I just concluded one of those shake-up tests, changing my default browser from my beloved Firefox to Google’s new-ish browser Chrome. After a week of exclusive use, I’ve decided it’s not yet time to abandon Firefox (despite it beginning to show signs of bloat) because, quite simply, Chrome just isn’t ready for prime time.

The pros of Chrome: It is the fastest browser in the stable of six I have installed (along with Firefox, IE, Seamonkey, Safari and Opera). It renders pages snappily, and – as you might expect – handles Google’s products flawlessly. I’m a big consumer of Google’s gmail, calendar, reader and almost a dozen of their other services, so this is no small consideration. On most of the advanced web services I use aside from Google stuff, Chrome measures up pretty well. The reason I started considering a switch last week was yet another stream of errors with flash-based video in Firefox, a problem that until last week I hadn’t encountered since FF went to 3.0. With Flash-based sites and site elements (and indeed, most Adobe dynamic media I encountered), Chrome behaved well. Where it faltered was in places that were only expecting FF or IE. Zoho doesn’t work at all in Chrome. Some special features that I was checking out on Yahoo.jp didn’t work. Bing crashed its Chrome tab pretty consistently (although I blame Silverlight in that one as well). So not all of the web works just yet. But you can get to much more of it in Chrome than you can in Opera.

Another major plus in Chrome’s favor is the threading it uses. If there’s a fault in one of your tabs, it doesn’t bring your browsing to a screeching halt (most of the time). As I mentioned, Bing caused its tab to crash on, I believe, four of the five times I tried loading it, especially if I was trying to see older backgrounds. But the only adverse thing that happened was a notice from Chrome that the tab’s process had crashed and that the tab needed to be closed. However, everything else I was doing was completely unaffected. Chrome separates each tab into a discreet process, something you can see clearly by going into Windows’ Task Manager during a Chrome session. As more and more of our daily life is moved into web applications, the need for IE and FF to move to that sort of tab-threading will become more urgent. It is one of the major advances that Chrome brings to the table.

But, at the end of the day, I am a creature of habit. I like spending time getting things just-so, and then leaving it alone. Firefox won the day in that regard a long time ago with its browser extensions (an idea it shamelessly stole from Opera but implemented in a much better fashion). I forgot just how much I’ve customized the living hell out of Firefox until I moved over to Chrome and didn’t have so many of the little shortcuts and visual cues in my browser that I was used to. And this, ultimately is the dealbreaker for me. Here’s a checklist of items that I have in Firefox that I will require in Chrome (either as parallel extensions, or something within the browser itself that mirrors their functionality:

• ForecastFox – A line that appears either in the menubar or statusbar that is customizable but generally contains current weather conditions and forecasts. Saves me from going to Weather Underground every time I want to see a forecast or the temperature, and unavailable in Chrome.
• IE Tab: Instead of always going over to IE, especially if I am testing something, I’ll just click the little icon in the statusbar that changes the rendering engine from mozilla to IE’s. All of IE’s features and ties to Windows become available right within Firefox itself. Pretty handy, and unavailable in Chrome.
• Image Zoom: A very simple-yet-powerful tool that lets me blow up images on my screen just by right-clicking on an image and selecting a size. Useful when people post images that are smaller than my screen resolution allows to view comfortably. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing that duplicates that behavior in Chrome.
• PDF Download: Another simple tool. It simply provides an option when I click on a PDF link of either viewing or saving the PDF. Sometimes I just want to look at it. Sometimes I’m saving it for posterity. In either case, I’m a fix-it-and-forget-about-it kind of guy, so having that option in the moment is of high value to me. Chrome just offers to save them. Bleh.
• Tab Mix Plus: While I didn’t experience much difficulty at all with Chrome’s tabs, there are a few behaviors I would alter if I could. Oh wait, I can. Just not in Chrome. Lack of options in how the tabs behave makes Chrome a non-starter.
• Xmarks: Formerly Foxmarks, the popularity of being able to back up your bookmark file and even sync your bookmarks across computers caused the developers to create Safari and IE extensions for their tool, which caused the thing to be renamed. Opera has its own bookmark backup tool that is not compatible. Chrome, however, has bubkes. Your bookmarks get horked in Chrome and man, you’re screwed. Having invested as much time as I have in maintaining my bookmarks, the thought of having to start from scratch is positively horrifying, so Xmarks becomes essential. No Xmarks for Chrome = No Chrome for checkypantz.

There are a few other minor annoyances I have with Chrome: non-standard titlebar, no easy way to determine if a site has an RSS feed (there’s an RSS indicator that lights up in Firefox’s Awesomebar), and a few other minor things. Perhaps the most annoying was the inability to use the search bar that’s in the left-hand sidebar in Wikipedia (and indeed, in all WikiMedia-powered sites). I couldn’t get the cursor into the box, instead having to click the search button with the search box empty, then entering my search terms in the box in the main body of the resulting page. That smells more like a bug than a shortcoming to me, and one I suspect will likely get fixed in short order.

On the whole, Chrome is a very good browser, and appears to be well on its way to becoming an excellent browser. Given time, it will replace Firefox as my default, unless the Mozilla project comes up with something truly revolutionary that leapfrogs Chrome. But for now, it’s still an also-installed for me.