IE & Firefox Could Take A Lesson From Chrome

Saturday, September 13th, 2008
by Ron Schenone

When Google released their own browser version called Chrome, I recall it was mentioned that the browser used a feature called ’sandbox’, which in theory, had each tab running on its own. The theory also was when a web site crashed, it would not take down the entire browser. I didn’t give this much thought until today.

I have been playing with Chrome while running Firefox as well. I was trying to access a site in Firefox that would not come up. I than noticed that Firefox had froze. I couldn’t do a thing with it. So I opened up Chrome and purposely went to the same site, in a new tab. The site also froze while loading. But there was one huge difference. Chrome allowed me to close the tab and continue working.

I could not force Firefox closed. I even tried to restart and shutdown. Nope. Nothing. I forced a reboot to close Firefox and started again.

There has been much criticism of Chrome and its lack of features. But this one feature should be included in both IE and Firefox. The ’sandbox’ feature is extremely helpful and would of saved me about 10 minutes in shutdown and rebooting. Not only that, since cloud computing is on the horizon, I could of lost my work if I were using a online application. Google took this into account when they built this feature into Chrome.

Comments welcome.

15 Comments

Bryan Price

September 13th, 2008
at 2:24pm

Sysinternal’s ProcExp, Process Explorer. Easy enough to kill a hung process. I use it instead of task manager.

Don B. Culp

September 13th, 2008
at 3:10pm

You can also drag a tab from flock or firefox to chrome

Larry

September 13th, 2008
at 6:41pm

“I would of lost my work if…” is painful to read, as is the apparent (I hope) typo in, “I even tries to restart and shutdown.”

Yes, I’m a pedantic bastage (yes, that was intentional) that hates to see a reputable web site lose respect because of basic carelessness in checking your work.

But likewise, I’ve never had a problem killing a process from the Task Manager when something locks up as badly as that. It may take some time, but it will die eventually.

Besides, doesn’t Chrome have that ugly habit, disguised as a helpful feature, of key-logging what you type in the address bar (supposedly to help you find what you’re looking for a little quicker, a-la ask.com)? I believe there was mention of it being a ‘feature’ that could be disabled, but I can’t help but think that Google wouldn’t still like to know what you’re searching for. For its own harmless research, of course…

Anyway, I just started getting the hang of FF after ditching Opera, so I’m not quite ready to leap to another browser just yet.

Tori

September 13th, 2008
at 6:51pm

What do you all think about video playback in chrome?

I really like the browser other than this “flaw” and was curious if anyone else felt it wasn’t up to par with firefox.

Ron Schenone

September 14th, 2008
at 4:52pm

Hello Tori,
I haven’t found a problem with playback. Have you?

Tori

September 14th, 2008
at 6:46pm

It’s not that I’m having a problem with it per say, it just isn’t as smooth as it is in Firefox. I was wondering if anyone else noticed.

ephraim r.

September 15th, 2008
at 12:29am

I liked chrome, however switched back to my previous browser AVANT, who by the way the same day had most of Chrome new features added to them.

ron

September 15th, 2008
at 12:46am

I am waiting a little longer before installing chrome as nobody is paying me to be a beta tester!
The main problem as far I am concerned with firefox is the freezes & the whole system slowing up until you kill the process with Task Manager problem being if you don’t know why these things are happening & how to unjam can cause no end of problems for none tec user’s & get them to use other browsers.

Robert

September 15th, 2008
at 1:56am

I’m still not sold on Chrome. I regularly use IE, FF and Flock (all open now), and don’t see Chrome being much better at this time.

Denny

September 15th, 2008
at 7:42am

You Guys Spend So Much Trying To Find a
…Better …….Browser Than . IE …
Doesn’t Seem Like . YUR . Have-in Much Luck . ! ^^^^

Ren

September 15th, 2008
at 8:09am

I am not sold on this either. Still sticking to my IE and FF.

Diamond

September 15th, 2008
at 10:32am

I agree FF gets pretty annoying when a browser fails all the other sites fail, I hope they fix that in the newer versions.

MGA

September 15th, 2008
at 2:56pm

I hate to say that but chrome has couple really good feature. It is definitely better than IE but i am still not convinced if it is better than firefox…

lionroar

September 16th, 2008
at 1:28pm

I tried it, but really missed all my favorite extensions like “panic, dummy lipsum, and IE Tab. Also I get bored easily so I like changing my themes alot. When I uninstalled it, I was taken to a survey web page asking me why I decided to uninstall. I simply stated that “I miss my extension listed above”.