On Windows, I’ve been
solely using Google’s Chrome browser, leaving my Firefox copy at bay: Firefox only gets into action if I need to confirm that Chrome’s cache-loading-stuff has gone amuck again. Yesterday, for example we suddenly lost connection to the Internets and when Chrome decided to go into indefinite looping mode (it does that particularly when its internal cache is screwed up), I started up Firefox only to run into the pretty dialog shown above (or on the right). It seems that Firefox’s updater requires a persistent connection nowadays. What happened to ‘working offline’ if no connection was found?
On my Linux/Ubuntu desktop machine, I use a combination of browsers, of course: On Gnome, Firefox is the main browser and yes, Opera is good second. When I log into KDE, Konqueror is my default browser: Though, with all this Flash stuff (and the Konqueror hang-ups), I always have Firefox ‘on the ready’.
This reminds me that I find Firefox a lot more ‘faster’ on Ubuntu than on Windows (XP/Vista), even if you consider the fact that the Ubuntu machine runs on 2005 hardware (Centrino, 512 MB, yadda-yadda). If you recall, earlier Firefox 3 (beta) releases for Ubuntu were disasters mainly because obscure SQLite transactions happening in the background of a browsing session (earlier here). However, since Chrome for Linux is officially still Alpha (if you’ve seen the images you know what I mean), there’s no rush to switch browsers on the Linux platform.