A couple of weeks ago, I first started using Chrome in a serious manner, now that extensions were finally available. While back then things were still a bit sketchy, esp. in the “Adblock Plus” alike department, AdThwart has come a long way and seems to have been updated daily since then.

It now supports on-the-fly filter creation, adblock plus blocklists (with full syntax support) and also the unnerving “flashing” of ads while they are being removed is now gone.

So together with the plugins “bettergmail”, “proxyswitchy” and a flash killer of sorts, google chrome has now become my primary browser for daily use on Linux (primarily Mint 8, but also Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 1). Memory footprint is lower than Firefox’es (can be an issue on a 1gb laptop), it’s way faster both in HTML and Javascript processing and hasn’t crashed on me in any serious way ever since I started using it. Also, the flash plugin somehow performs better than in Firefox.

Theme support also has come a long way, with one-click installs right from Chrome’s theme library, and there are some real beauties out there.

If I didn’t have any concerns about google’s ever-growing influence and the slow, but steady erosion of their once high-held company credo “don’t be evil”, I’d easily give it a 10 rating, but with this in mind I’ll stick with an 8.5 out of ten for now.

Keep up the good work!