I think Chrome is intended to be minimalistic, but sometimes minimalism can be taken too far.
Which reminds me of an old saying: "Moderation is great as long as you don't overdo it"

I prefer FireFox too - but I wish FF would render text as nicely as IE, it can look very spidery or pixellated in some fonts, although that might just be my opinion.
And FF on my computer takes ages to load.

About the only advantage of the FF (and most other browsers) rendering style is that text within <strong></strong> tags stand out more in some font sizes.

takes ages to load for you? I admit it takes a bit to load for me, but not that long, and IE8 takes like 3 times as long to load for me. How many addons you running? That has quite a bit to do with load time. I've cut mine down quite a bit but I still have about 10 running.

I'm only running Xmarks, but I haven't timed FF against other browsers and my perception of loading time it probably skewed by a general disc-access problem I'm having with Windows XP right now, start-up times and program-load times are getting very long (have I got a malware infection, I wonder?).

Turning 60 and becoming a grumpy old man short of patience doesn't help either...

lol well run a scan silly! I scan generally when I go to bed so it doesn't interrupt my valuable *coughs* time lol

****tassietiger ponders on what it could be that Jo Ann doesn't want interrupted ****

A week ago I scanned after Windows Check Disc insisted it check my 3rd hard drive on boot up.
The scan found a couple of trojans, I clicked on "repair" and boot times were back to normal.

Next day, another scan, same result.. after a while it seemed I had a trojan that was managing to avoid complete eradication. This drive was used to hold my daily backups so I thought "oh (expletive deleted) it, I'll wipe the drive" and did a fast-format.
On rebooting it flew like a jet so I hoped that I'd got rid of the trojan.

Then next time I started up it was back to the same problem of sl-o-o-w booting and a request to check a hard drive, except the trojans were found on my 2nd hard drive (also used as a daily backup storage).
So I wiped this one too!

At the moment scanning shows all clear but the slow disc access problem persists, perhaps permanent damage to file structure has been done somewhere in my system.

I'm reluctant to do a bed-time scan as I like to keep an eye on things and my area is currently prone to power outages (hot & humid, lots of "flash and bang", and we are on Cyclone Watch with a threatening low forming in the Arafua Sea).

And I'm now getting a faint regular chirp coming from the computer (not from the speakers) coinciding with a flash from the "hard drive LED" - so perhaps the problem is a mechanical fault in a drive?

*** I only got my computer back from the repair shop 3 weeks ago, If it has to go in again I'll cry like a baby until it's back home. What did we do in the old days for entertainment when we didn't have home computers? ***

BTW Jo Ann, what are the main differences between IE8 & IE7 (I'm still running 7)?
Any improvement with conforming to HTML standards?

Zipper - I hope you have a good back-up system in place. It sounds like you might be about to experience a hard drive crash
(Mine bit the dust after having a new motherboard installed)