I’ve had enough of Firefox freezing and locking up. I know it’s the stupid intranet sites and IETab that do it, so not strictly the fault of Firefox, but I’m fed up of one tab bringing the whole thing down. So I’m giving ChromePlus a proper go.
The only thing remaining that Firefox still has over ChromePlus is gmail notifier - incredibly useful because it supports multiple accounts, provides me with actual notification windows and helps keep my personal (I.e: non-work related) clutter down (which was pretty much contained to Firefox). Oh, that and FireGPG, but I use that so rarely it doesn’t matter.
ChromePlus has everything else I use in Firefox built in: Userscripts (Greasemonkey), Application shortcuts (Prism), Developer Tools (Firebug).
I had hoped I could use this new standalone Gmail Notifier to solve the email problem, but no - it uses IMAP and if I could access Gmail over IMAP at work I’d be fine anyway. So in the meantime I’m running two instances of Google’s Gmail Notifier (someone needs to break out a thesaurus for “Notifier”) Gnotify app (Although when I’m not behind my work firewall I’m going to try downloading the Gmail Growl for Windows. The Firefox Gmail Notifier also does some magic to let you switch between accounts pretty seamlessly. To get something equivalent I’m using an incognito application shortcut and a normal application shortcut so I can have both Gmail accounts logged in at the sametime.
A couple of notes on using ChromePlus:
1) I’ve installed ChromePlus to my user directory (D:\Users\me\Applications\ChromePlus) since it doesn’t follow the windows recommended practice of creating separate user data directories - it’s more akin to a portable app.
2) I couldn’t get themes to work by selecting one as you would in Chrome. Using chrome://extension I managed to load an unpacked crx file: I created a directory called Unpacked Extensions in the ChromePlus UserData folder and used 7zip to unpack the extension.