So this past week and a half I have been on a personal experiment.  I decided to treat Google like I was a god (which those who know me well will tell you is not an unusual state of mind for me): What I give with one hand, I take away with the other.

I was a big fan of Firefox when it first came out, and stuck with it pretty faithfully. Then with IE 7, I switched back and then with the recent release of IE 8, well when considering the developer tools, Firefox became the poor stepchild.  And then with the recent problems with Silverlight in Firefox 3, well the developers of FireFox were starting to piss me off.

• Silverlight 1 and 2 work in Firefox 2
• Firefox 3 beta comes out,  and Silverlight <object> tag stops working correctly (mind you all the other old object tags still work fine)
• Microsoft issues patch to javascript that works with firefox to correct problems with silverlight <object> tag.
• Firefox 3.0 final is released, and Whoops, Silverlight isn’t working again!
• So you can’t reliably use the <object> tag for Silverlight, but you can get around it by hard coding up the html to load it the old fashioned html 2 way.
  • Except Whoops, Firefox 3 won’t properly route Silverlights AJAX traffic to a website if the Silverlight page is served up in ASP.NET MVC… (mind you Fiddler says the calls coming in and going out of IIS are exactly the same for IE, Firefox, Safari, but only Firefox can’t seem to handle the return data correctly)

I know I should never assume malice for what can be explained by stupidity but you have to wonder.

So I like IE, but I try to make sure I keep an open mind; never one to say I don’t try new things, I decided to take a look at Google’s Chrome.  So I committed to a full course of Chrome, I allowed it to make itself the default browser, and I’ll give it at least 30 days full try out.

Early returns are I like it! It’s debugging tools pale in comparison to IE, and I really wish it had a built in RSS feed system, but right now, except for those two issues I have no doubt will be corrected in future releases, I’ve come to really like Chrome.  It even runs well on my x64 OS (the same can not be said of Apple’s latest Safari release).  So I’ll still go back to IE for CSS tweaking / testing / examining, and Javascript debugging (and rss reading) but at this rate I think Chrome will remain my default browser past it’s 30 day tryout.

So that was the “give with one hand” part, what about the “take away with the other” part?  Well I’ve decided in the same spirit of Giving Chrome a fair chance, I would try to give Bing the same fair chance.  Provided it did the base amount of work I need it to do, in place of Google, I would try to give it a full 30 day trial.  Now here in New Zealand, they are still only serving up Bing Beta to us, so I’m not getting the full Bing experience, but that hasn’t hurt my opinion of it at all.

For the first 2 days of Bing usage, I double checked my searches against Google, and there was nothing that made Google more relevant, and to be honest, in 90% cases I found Bing’s results to be no better or worse then Google’s results, 5% of the time it was better, 5% of the time it was worse. That let me know that I could use it, and only need to fall back to Google in the rare circumstance just to double check. I also have an ability to remote desktop to a computer based in the US, and in those cases I get the full Bing experience when I do searches on that machine, and so far the Bing result list / categorization makes it the better search choice 75% of the time.

So when Microsoft finally let’s us here in New Zealand get to the real Bing engine, Google is going to have to do some work and pretty fast to make it more then a “let me check that result on Google just to make sure that Bing didn’t miss something” runner up.