Chrome

I’m bit of a conservative these days when it comes to software. Add to that my sometimes background in doing computer articles, which prompted me to keep my installation pretty much bog standard, and I’ve persisted with some software for a very long time.

For example, for freeform documents and occasional vector graphics, I still use Micrografx Designer 6.0a for Windows 95, which I purchased in 1996. Fourteen year old software, and it works fine (except that it can’t do automatic page rotations when printing). More than fine, really, because it is ridiculously fast since it was designed to work x486 computers running at a few hundred MHz.

I’ve skipped the whole Vista thing, sticking with XP, although I’m open now to going to Windows 7.

And until now, I’ve resisted the blandishments of the web browsers competing with Internet Explorer. But lately I’ve been getting a little sick of how slow it sometimes is, especially just to open a new tab. Yesterday it was slowing down everything on my desktop (I think), and it took many minutes to actually close down itself once I decided to do that.

Frustrated, I installed Google Chrome. My goodness gracious me, talk about fast! Not just in doing its own stuff, but in presenting web pages. What does IE do with them? Insert a thousand cycle loop between the display of each character?

Truth is, the speed boost seems to be rather more than when I switched from 1.5Mbps to ~8Mbps ADSL a few months ago.