Chrome is still my primary desktop browser, but that might be changing. The desktop version has thousands of extensions, apps, plugins, and themes. These extend a basic browser in many useful ways. Add in an excellent set of developer tools, plus the ability to use several different user profiles simultaneously, and it’s a great tool.

Lately, however, Firefox has been making excellent strides and is vastly improved. This gives Chrome a good run for its money. Chrome’s recent insistence on disallowing some potentially-risky things that developers need to do (safely) on their local machines, the stuff that gets in the way when using Chrome is making it far less desirable. Each new release seems to come with extra baggage.

Chrome Mobile: not so good

The features that make Chrome such a worthwhile desktop browser are unfortunately not present in its mobile form on Android devices. There are no plugins available, nor any planned. Blocking ads is built in, but half baked. Any other cool plugins? Not there. Page rendering and speed is OK, but Firefox definitely wins that contest.

Despite its shortcomings, I heartily encourage everyone to check out both Chrome and Firefox instead of the built-in browsers on Windows (Internet Explorer) and MacOS (Safari).

• Get Chrome here: https://www.google.com/chrome/