The Shift
I’ve added four developers to my team in the past month or so. Each got a brand new Dell workstation to configure as they liked. All chose to use Eclipse Helios over the MyEclipse IDE licenses the company had purchased. One chose to use VirtualBox and Kubuntu as his development OS. The most surprising thing was the choice of browsers: all but one are running Chrome as their primary browser.
I remember the days when Firefox was king for geeks. If you were doing web development, it was a must have tool. But those days are long dead. I ditched Firefox around the end of last year and haven’t looked back. And apparently I’m not alone. Chrome is now king for software developers, which does not bode well for Firefox. I’ll always appreciate Firefox for pushing innovation forward prior to the currently-waging Web 2.0 Browser Wars, but I suspect it is headed the way of Netscape Navigator.
It’s too bad that so many people value new and shinier functionality over certain rights and freedoms for users. Have you read the Chrome EULA? Take a look at http://www.intelligentdesign.com.au/blog/2009/04/05/why-you-shouldnt-use-google-chrome/ and see if you still prefer using Chrome over Firefox.
Tim -
That’s an interesting observation. I’ve used Chrome almost exclusively for over a year as well. I still keep IE/FF around for testing etc.. the biggest irritation that I had with FireFox was that it seemed that every time I launched it I had to wait another 7 minutes for it to update my extensions (and I only used about 6 extensions!)
My favorite feature in Chrome: it does tabs right. It’s second nature to pull a tab out of a window or shove it into an existing one. All browsers should do tabs this way.