There’s been many a post about the best combination of developer addons for Firefox, the best browsers for designers and coders, the best this and that. However, I think I’ve found the ultimate browser experience. A couple of the features before I get onto the detail:

• Simple interface, minimal top bars
• Built in mail client, with notification upon receiving new mail
• Excellent developer tools
• Perfectly fast
• Looks amazing, runs amazing, is amazing

It is, of course, not Google Chrome. In fact, it’s good old Firefox. Lets take a look at why and how it’s possible to make Firefox the “ultimate browser experience”.

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It’s amazing, simply amazing. It took me about two minutes to get downloaded and installed (most likely due to my slow internet), and then I was up and running! Web pages load extremely fast, it’s pretty insane honestly. Anyway, let’s run through some cool features:

Interface. The Chrome interface is amazing, extremely minimalist, very tab focussed, with some neat little animations, but they’re not too overdone. It’s both beautiful and usable, it just works! Another thing I noticed was the address bar, check it out, highlights the url you’re on, with the actual sub-directory greyed slightly, genius, so simple, so good. Also, I immediately noticed a lack of a status bar, but soon realized it does exist, but it only exists when needed (nicely fades in, and out).

Speed. This browser is simply amazing, webpages are basically instant to load and be displayed, and when you’re using Tiscali internet, that’s a pretty amazing achievement. Not only this, but Chrome is using just 44mb of ram! Compared to FireFox (also running) which is taking a whopping 197mb. Now that’s amazing.

Features. Chrome boasts an “incognito” mode which basically records nothing, so yeah, that’s got a pretty obvious use, but I currently can’t see many other uses than that really, unless you’re buying gifts perhaps? The homepage is also different, showing your most commonly visited sites, but I simply set it to reload my tabs from last time.

The problems. It may be in beta, but it’s pretty good. I did notice a few things though, which are particularly annoying:

1. Checkboxes don’t seem to appear anywhere? (extremely annoying)
2. It doesn’t always offer to save password (didn’t on digg anyway)
3. No good bookmarking method, only a simple toolbar.
4. No mousewheel click scrolling, something I really, really need.
5. Update, found another error: Chrome doesn’t seem to support overflow: auto; in CSS OK, looks like this is now working, but not always for me. I’ll have to take a deeper look into this. My test file which is working is here.
6. No design on direct feeds. Also, the FeedBurner xml link doesn’t appear in Chrome (perhaps Google want to hide the fact it won’t display properly?). Direct viewing redirects to the original FeedBurner page.
7. Update 2: another, submit <inputs> backgrounds style don’t always work properly like they do in FF and  IE.

However, from what I’ve seen, it’s fast, it’s simple, it’s beautiful. I can’t wait for it to come out of beta, I can assure you, the final product will be amazing.

On a final note, this might be bad news for FireFox however, even if they can survive without Google’s funding, such an amazing browser like this might win-over many, many FireFox users (especially when we consider that a lot of FireFox users are more… tech savvy).

Update: one more annoying thing (not Google’s fault) is the lack of StumbleUpon for a while!