I was a long-time user (and lover of) Firefox. But I got really sick of the Firefox screen randomly turning white and not responding for 30 seconds to 3 minutes at a time. I tried all the standard troubleshooting stuff: disabling my extensions and plug-ins, clearing my history, etc. But nothing worked, and no one at the Firefox support forums seemed to be interested in helping me.
So I ditched Firefox and have been using Chrome for the past couple of months. While it works – as in, it doesn’t hang up like Firefox does – Chrome isn’t without its problems. The version of AdBlock for Chrome sucks, and frequently caused massive slow-downs. Disabling this made the problem go away, but now I have to use Ghostery, which is fine, but not the same sort of ad-blocker AdBlock is.
But the worst thing about Chrome is the way it renders text. Check this out.. it’s a screencap of text from this very website. My site runs WordPress (one of the most common publishing platforms in the online world) on Apache (the most common web server in the world). Running Chrome with minimal plug-ins looks like this:
Notice that the words “an illusion instantly shattered when I came home and my then-” are in a different font that the rest of the text. For comparison, here’s the same text captured on IE and Firefox on the same computer:
Notice that IE and Firefox use consistent fonts throughout.
Also, Chrome has a nasty habit of adding extra whitespace around italicized text:
In the above sample, you can see the mismatched text (“the loneliness” is a different font), while there’s too much space between “just” and “feel”. Here’s an especially bad example. Why is there SO MUCH SPACE between “positively” and “perfect” near the bottom of the paragraph?
I want to like you Chrome, I really do. But while IE and Firefox can seemingly handle the basic task of displaying text, you seem to have problems with it.