Wandering by mistake

eventually she will click on the red O, if not sooner, sometimes later, but if Chrome suits her needs, why not? my 8 year old has her own computer since she was 6 and has been using Firefox up until fall of last year, she had Opera on her desktop, but would never use it, she'd see my Opera and ask questions about the way i customized it, thought it was cool, would ask me if she could do the same on her Opera, and that was it, she'd get back on her Firefox,
then one day in September she said: "popa, come over here!" (we speak French and English at home), she had skinned her Opera pink, i helped her customize it the way she wanted and she's been using Opera since, Firefox, like she says, is in the garage, she uses no more than a third of the features and options available (speed dial, block content, among a few others) and she particularly likes the fact that said features are integrated to the browser instead of having to be downloaded as add-ons like Firefox, she's not big on Opera mail thought, it's lame, she says, she uses Hotmail, where she can modify and color the fonts and access tons of emoticons,
however, what a child wants of a browser is: take me to my site and do it fast, and as far as my daughter is concerned Opera beats Firefox flat, one of her preferred site is Webkinz and she says that with Opera it loads in a jiffy while with Firefox she had to wait and wait and wait...

I am of the opinion that Google Chrome is currently what Firefox dreamed of being--a fast, lightweight, simple browser that was very good at day to day browsing. However, as Mozilla reworked the Firefox code, it became more and more like it's parent, the bulky Mozilla suite. In fact, some statistics put Firefox behind the Mozilla suite in terms of loading time and memory consumption.

I think Mozilla's approach to extensions by building a basic browser and letting 3rd parties build on top was innovative, but there just isn't enough meat in the browser to make it usable by a power user. Like many other power users, I'm forced to run Firefox with 20 or more extensions to make it feel usable, at at that point, I'm running a POS slower than Microsoft with the potential for far many more security holes.

I heard Google has plans to add in an extension framework to Chrome. If this is true, then the world's only lightweight browser will become another piece of bloated crap. Google, if you're reading this, learn from Mozilla's mistake. Even though Firefox has broken into Internet Exhorror's marketshare, it's useless out of the box. Keep Chrome small and light--let it be an offline application for Google Docs and Gmail. If I want features, there's plenty of other options. Chrome's found its niche so far.

I agree that Opera is not for people who haven't seen the web before. Perhaps Opera should consider a checkbox in the installer to load a simple UI.

With that said, I'm amazed at the microscopic installer for Opera (and how Asa Dotzler whined for years about Opera not having an auto-updater), and Opera manages to fit in so many features without turning the browser into a slug. Load up Firefox with enough extensions to make it match Opera's functionality, and you'll be looking at 45 or 60-second cold start times and 1.5 gigs of RAM, not including web page content.