The past few weeks I’ve been making a real effort to use Google’s Chrome broswer on all my computers.  On my work laptop, which runs Windows, it has been a mostly pleasent experience.  The browser is fast, responsive, and it seems to handle most sites that I visit quite well.  I decided to install the Chrome on my home PC, which runs Linux (Ubuntu 9.04).  The experience there has not been so great.

To begin with, the lack of plugin functionality makes browsing some frequently used websites annoying.  Especially the lack of Flash support.  I don’t visit a ton of flash intensive web sites but I do visit a few and the one’s I do rely on Flash quite heavily.  I did try and use nightly builds of Chromium, the open source browswer that Chrome is based on, but this was really hit and miss and cause a lot of crashes on sites with zero Flash and just plain javascript.  I had issues loading Gmail in Chromium, that’s how bad it was.  Chrome itself ran into the occasional problem loading a page and once it hit that particular snag it required a complete restart of the browser to get things working correctly again, simply closing the tab did not work.

End result?  I went back to using Firefox on Linux (even if it’s not 3.5 yet).  It works without issue and can view all the websites I need to access on a near daily basis.  I will continue to check out Chrome (and Chromium) on Linux to keep tabs on where things are at, but at the moment it seems that Firefox is the only truely, cross platform, mainstream browser on the market today.