Goodbye Opera, Hello Chrome

Well as part of saying why I made Simple Notepad I thought I should start at the beginning and say why I moved to Google Chrome. For years I had been a fan of Opera, not the music although they do have some catchy tunes, but the browser. I can't remember when I first started to use it as my main browser but it was around 2002 probably. Now I am obviously not the longest serving Opera user, nor did I use all of its features. I did appreciate however that it was the fastest browser around and that I got an inner glow for using a browser that complied with specifications. I even put up with it not working with every web page I visited and needing to fall back to IE at times.

I can't pinpoint the exact release where it started to go wrong, but was either in the late 9.x versions or the early 10.x versions. So what was wrong? Occasionally I would not be able to log into my Gmail account, a bit weird and it was reported a lot with a few settings tweaks to fix it which certainly made it better but not perfect. This was annoying but where it really went wrong was in the 10.54 version (I think) where pages wouldn't load at all and visiting some sites brought the browser to its knees, these were sites that previously worked and no longer did, you know little known sites like ebay or Ajaxian. This forced me to migrate away, what use was a browser (even if I do love its features) that can't browse sites that I visit regularly. Was I being less tolerant of Opera than I used to be? Probably, but I think rightly so, the web has moved on since 2002 and so has Opera, but that was the final straw really (and I didn't just give up straight away I did research to see if there was a fix and couldn't find anything). I needed a new browser and more importantly I needed my wife to stop nagging me as to why ebay wasn't working any more.

Well the options were the usual suspects, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. So why Chrome and not the others? Well like I said I did love Opera and there were features in that that I wasn't ready to give up:
  • Built in RSS feed reader
  • Tabbed browsing with the URL under the tab
  • Note taking in the browser
  • Bookmarks and note synchronization
  • Tab switching to the last used tab (not the next tab along)
  • Speed Dial
  • Undo closed tabs
  • Save current set of tabs/open previously saved tabs
Not an exhaustive list of requirements but these are kind of unique to Opera and I wanted to get as many of them in my browser as possible. Now before the Firefox fans say that it can do all of those things I just want to put a stake in the ground regarding Firefox. I have used it and do use it a lot especially for my work, but for some reason I just can't really warm to it as my main browser not sure why I have tinkered with it a lot to try to warm to it but I still can't. The other reason (which is probably more practical) is because I use it at work for my web development and have it set up in such a way for my development that really makes it useless as a day to day browser.

Moving swiftly back to Chrome, I managed to get nearly all of the requirements I wanted from Chrome either natively (tabbed browsing with the url bar underneath the tabs) or using extensions (Google Reader Checker, Recent Tabs, RSS Subscription Extension, Session Buddy, Sexy Undo Close Tab and Speed Dial) albeit with some compromises in some cases. All except the note taking with synchronization. There are many good notepad type extensions out there, but none that really did the 'create multiple notes and have them synced/stored centrally) hence I decided to write one myself, which is why Simple Notepad was born.

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