I’ve been torn between Chrome and Firefox on my Windows box for a while now. At home I use Safari 4 on Mac as it’s got the best of all worlds and uses my preferred Webkit based engine, but when on Windows I want to switch permanently to Chrome to get the streamlined speed it provides but there’s just a few things holding me back.

Initially when I switched to Chrome I didn’t really miss anything but as I continued to use it I really missed Xmarks. Xmarks keeps my bookmarks at home, on my iPhone and at work in sync and does it all without any interaction on my part. It is essentially seamless. The more I changed at work or at home the more bothered I became by the lack of that seamless sync.

I also missed adblock. Now some people don’t like adblock and with the speed of Chrome I guess there’s not as much benefit to it as there is for slower browsers due to the code that needs to be executed in the ads. However, I still don’t like looking at ads. I find the flashing, eye catching ads the most annoying and those ads that take over a section of your screen even more so.

With Firefox 3.5 the raw javascript speed advantage that Chrome had was reduced and therefore I eventually migrated back to Firefox for the convenience of addons. Chrome beta 3 however has increased the gap again and I’m longing to port my addons over to Chrome. Chrome now has limited browser sync but it’s not the same as syncing across multiple platforms. Once Xmarks gets their act together and gets Chrome syncing in place I can see myself forsaking Firefox for the speed. There are a few smaller niggles like a more limited dictionary support and the fact that spell check doesn’t seem to operate as well or automatically in text boxes (being a writer it’s exceptionally important to get that kind of functionality right in the browser you’re going to be writing in), but overall I think Chrome and the webkit engine are more suited to my liking.