Plenty has been written on Google’s Chrome browser (for the Mac in my case), so I don’t intend to re-tread that ground. However, I’ve always spent time with new browsers that are released and have always gone back to Safari after a while. This time, coming back to Safari from Chrome, was the first time ever that I’ve actually missed the other browser. So I thought I’d jot down some of my impressions of the experience and how it compares to my status quo of Safari.

A lot of people talk up Chrome’s performance relative to whatever browser they were using, usually Firefox or IE. I don’t find Chrome to be faster than Safari in any subjective way, and I didn’t test it. I also didn’t find it to be particularly more stable—I had a few tabs crash in the course of a month in Chrome and only one time did Chrome ever wedge itself to where I had to quit it altogether. That seems about on par with Safari in my experience. That said, one place where Chrome did outshine Safari was memory usage. With a full complement of tabs, with Flash blocked, Chrome uses less memory just sitting there in the background than does Safari. Safari seems to love allocating and holding on to memory for some reason, which is annoying.

I found that when I first moved to Chrome, I would instinctively hit tab to search, since Safari’s location bar doesn’t double as a search entry field as it does on Chrome (and Firefox). This time, I had stayed with Chrome for more than a month, and not tabbing over became a habit that I’m forced to break again as I go back, and I’m finding that I prefer Chrome’s behavior even though I was initially annoyed at the location bar’s multipurpose nature.

There are a small number of things that I missed from Safari when I was using Chrome full-time: a proper, full-featured 1password integration; shortcuts and contextual menus to look words up in a dictionary from the browser; full-sized “chrome” bar at the top to drag the browser window with; and the excellent ClickToFlash plug-in.

It’s ironic that two of the items are plug-ins, which Chrome now officially supports but require hacky workarounds to implement in Safari, that are currently in Safari’s favor. I am certain that it’s just a sign of Safari’s relative maturity that this is the case, and that Chrome will exceed Safari very shortly in this regard. In fact, two plug-ins I enjoyed on Chrome (one for Google Voice integration and another for Gmail integration) are Chrome-specific, and although I’m sure there are similar ones for Safari, the unofficial nature of plug-ins on Safari make me keep them to a minimum.

But 1password is dear to my browsing experience, and the integration in Chrome is alpha-quality, by the authors’ admission. I have Safari remember and autofill nothing—no names, passwords, form-fields, nothing—instead using 1password to fill passwords, identities in web forms, etc. 1password is great at that on Safari, and barely passable at just filling passwords on Chrome. I’m happy to have had that bare minimum though, for I wouldn’t have bothered with Chrome without it. ClickToFlash has a functional equivalent on Chrome, although I find the excellent Safari plug-in to be superior.

The tabs-on-top UI of Chrome is frustrating. I remember that the Safari 4 beta did the same thing, but for some reason I don’t recall, it didn’t bother me the way it does with Chrome. I find that in Chrome, I’m frequently grabbing a tab and dragging it around instead of grabbing the window and moving it on the desktop. Annoying.

Despite these nits, this is the first time that I’m back in Safari, and instead of feeling like I’m back at home after a time away, I find that I’m missing Chrome. I think that when Chrome gets some more mature extensions, particularly a great 1password plug-in, I will give it another try. It just might stick.

Somehow, I just got around to installing RVM this weekend, and I’m not sure what I was waiting for. Not only does it do the job of allowing you to have easy access to multiple Ruby installations, but it also allows you to save sets of RubyGems as “gemsets”. You can switch to a desired Ruby and a desired gemset all in one command. Very cool. If you haven’t gone to RVM yet (and you’re not on Windows), check it out.

Cool collection of state tourism logos. I think Georgia’s is plain awesome, and am moderately embarrassed by my home state of California’s. In fact, the suck factor in most of them is pretty high. I’d say that New York’s iconic logo is timeless and Texas’ is bolstered by a pretty witty slogan.

Sweet. Well, except the wheels. 😉

Man, me too. There’s no way I can rationally justify a camera as expensive as a D700, but that didn’t stop me from buying one. And I don’t regret it—it’s the best camera I ever have, or likely ever will, own. But there’s no doubt it proves once again that being a gearhead sometimes means that you don’t make a rational purchasing decision.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, but that’s not because I haven’t wanted to. After slightly breaking my installation of Movable Type when upgrading it to MT5 (my fault), it simultaneously stopped the flow to the blog and enhanced my desire to “roll my own” blog engine. Not because that’s easier than fixing MT, but I’d just like to own the whole thing soup-to-nuts. I’ve gotten a fair way into writing my own engine, but it still isn’t quite ready for prime-time. So I fixed my MT issue and, as you can see by the entries just posted, have started back up with some stuff I’d saved to post about. Hopefully my new site will be up-and-running soon.

Holy crap, this is cool.

D&D on the Surface

I’ve played with the Surface at the AT&T stores and was largely disappointed with the performance, but let’s face the fact that this is fantasy gear anyway. Having a table like the Surface (but with nice, fluid performance) would be awesome to play D&D on. Or Magic. I haven’t played D&D in years, but this would make me want to try it out just to play on this table. Magic is more accessible and perhaps an even better match for the Surface.

FlashForward was inconsistent in its most recent episodes, but I like the premise and most of the show so far. However, this doesn’t sound good. It’ll be interesting to see if the quality continues to degrade when it returns.

Great ideas for the next TiVo, especially the one to record and sort by original broadcast date instead of the date an episode was recorded by the DVR.

I’ve been around for the Fruita Fat Tire Festival in years past, and it’s a fun event. They’ve scheduled it for April 29-May 2 this year. I haven’t figured out my plans for Spring bike riding, but the festival is always a decent choice.

Of course they issue a recall for my truck the day after we just took it in for warranty work. Gah!

File this under “likely to fail horribly”. What a terrible, terrible idea.

One of the ideas put forward here by Dave Winer, that you should control your own identity on the Internet, is one I whole-heartedly agree with. I’ve done points 1, 4, 5 and 6 and think that I’ll do #2 soon. I’m not sure I care quite as much about #3 yet, although I agree that reputation networks built on this idea would be powerful if they caught on widely. I’ll have to give that more thought.

Certainly, it’s clear to me that when companies like Google and Facebook own the profile and data by which other people know you, you’ve ceded a good deal of control to them. I’ve been planning to move my personal data of value to my own site and only include pointers to it from other sites, and plan to continue down that path. Since I don’t live in the public eye like Winer it hasn’t seemed as important. But the more I use these social networks, the less I think that my public exposure matters.

“The Big Picture” on boston.com has a feature on the Dakar Rally, and the pictures there are above the normally already high level of quality seen there. Definitely worth a look.

I was just reading an interesting discussion on creating Flickr’s short URLs for a given photo and thought I’d pass it along. The bookmarklet posted there works great for me in Safari.