My laptop is still going strong after a couple of years, but it is starting to get slower and slower, mainly when starting up. I am reluctant to buy a new one as this one has been so reliable. A reinstall of the Windows would help a lot, but I can’t bothered with that. I am happy to press the on switch, then just grab a coffee while it loads.
I have been using Firefox mostly, but found that it too can be slow and is a real memory hog. I still have IE6 installed and it loads faster than FF. Google of course have launched their own browser, Google Chrome and when I heard that it is faster than FF, I thought I would give it a try.
When I was having trouble with FF, I disabled all of the add-ons, as useful as they are. Chrome still loaded faster than FF with the extensions disabled. It has some nice features, like showing your most recently viewed sites when you open a new tab and being able to do searches right in the area where you usually type in your URLs. Suggestions are also displayed automatically and sometimes useful.
It does have a couple of glitches which I am sure Google will eventually get right, but overall I am happy with the experience, but I think it will be hard to move loyal users off IE and FF.
I really liked Chrome myself and actually tried it because Firefox was way slow and a memory hog like you stated. But I missed my FF plug-ins too much so I went back. I have since found that FF is much quicker if you have it clear all of your private data except saved forms and passwords when you exit the app. Once I learned that, I’ve been much happier with FF.
Thanks for the tip!
I hesitate to use even upgraded versions of Chrome, since my last experience using it (first version) left my computer compromised; have they fixed the security issues beyond all doubt?