PC cheats

This is a guest post by Lauren Bailey. If you wish to write one kindly check out the guidelines to write a guest post.

I have a confession to make: I am a tab addict. I love middle-clicking links to create new tabs; in fact, I’m fairly certain I open more tabs than I actually navigate to different URLs on the same tab. For me, it’s just how I do my research on the web. I like keeping old sites open in the chain of my research, so that I can get back to them easily for more information or perhaps further resources.

Backstory

I’ve used multiple browsers in my web surfing history. I still use multiple browsers. I used Firefox when it first came out, I’ve tried Opera and Safari on multiple occasions, and I tried out Chrome immediately as it was released. Over the past year or so, I have been flip-flopping between Chrome and Firefox, trying to decide which browser was best for my browsing needs and habits.

Chrome vs Firefox

This decision can come down to taste, user interface, or aesthetics, but for myself, I based it primarily on usability. Throughout my extensive use of both browsers, I noticed some general trends for both of them. For Firefox, I noticed the following pros and cons:

• Has lots of addons.
• Can specify it to incredible degrees.
• Can get a bit bulky and buggy over time.

For Chrome, I’ve noticed the following trends:

• Addons (known by Chrome as extensions) came late and still aren’t as numerous as Firefox.
• Incredibly lean and space-efficient user interface.
• Very quick, crisp, and hardly bulky at all.

I generally compare Chrome to a sports car while I compare Firefox to a nice-looking eighteen-wheeler truck. Chrome is good at getting you around the web in a fast and efficient manner. Firefox is good at giving you blogging addons, tab session addons, and any other addons you think you would ever need to survive a post-apocalyptic web-browsing situation.

Why I’m Currently Using Chrome

Because Firefox is the addon king, I had been using this browser quite a lot for the past year or so. However, I have been noticing increasing problems with certain types of video players as well as slow and laggy tab/window transitions on the browser (this lag had nothing to do with my internet speed or any performance issues on my computer as Chrome worked fine with equal amounts of tabs).

The one thing that kept me dedicated to using Firefox was the TabGroups ManagerAddon which give you an additional tab bar to create group tabs (basically the equivalent of folders) to organize your tabs. In a way, I still do miss this addon, as I haven’t quite found one on Chrome that replicates the awesome tabbed browsing experience I get from this one; however, I have found a Chrome extension that works well enough for me to switch browsers.

An extension on Chrome called Tab Manager convinced me to switch over to Chrome. It allows me to group and organize tabs through different windows of chrome. Best of all, it allows me to see which tabs I have open in which windows, select multiple tabs by holding down shift, and drag multiple tabs into different windows.

Combine this with Session Manager (which saves all the windows and tabs you currently have open in Chrome), and you have an awesome tabbed browsing experience that allows you not only to group tabs into windows quickly but also save all of your windows and restore them at any time.