Torn Elements

After a huge falling out with FireFox over memory usage, I was once again in the market to try another browser. I’ve been around the net for some time now and have found that all the other major market share browsers have ticked me off in one way or another.

Be it page rendering problems, high memory usage, processor bog downs, or just PITA interfaces, they’ve all let me down.

I’d looked at Chrome briefly during it’s very short Beta period. As impressed as I was I simply dismissed it as too early for full time use.

Out of Beta now, it was time to give this browser another look.

It’s really very good! After 2 solid days of running Chrome, I don’t see any of the issues which always seem to plague me with other browsers. Normally by now I would have had to shut down and restart other browsers for one reason or another. It appears that when you close a tab in Chrome, you actually get ALL the memory it was using back. Amazing!

The only essential thing keeping me from switching to Chrome full time is it’s lack of developer tools. I’m talking about tools like FireBug for FireFox and the like. Until Chrome sees tools like this I will be forever tied to using FireFox for development. However, I’m hoping good things will come from Chrome V2 in regard to this.

I realize there’s a console in the Developer options of Chrome but it lacks FireBug’s ability to edit CSS and other elements on-the-fly. I rely on FireBug heavily as it’s fantastic for fine tuning layouts, styles or just quickly inspecting how other sites achieve effects. (Yeah, I’m a big ol’ snoop! )

Chrome seems to be light and efficient which is perfect for ol’ FrankenPuter here. Hopefully that will remain in version 2.

If you’re running a slower system like me, then definitely have a look at Google Chrome. Your computer will thank you.

Software Google, Web Browsers

There must be a lack of image ad sponsors out there when it comes to Google Adsense. I’ve tried running these on two blogs in the past and never once found them relevant to any of my content.

I’m guessing because there are fewer image ad sponsors, diversity suffers. If your content doesn’t match any of the available image ads then you’re just given anything. In my case, I got nothing but online gaming ads with the occasion web host ad or something equally irrelevant.

The default at Google for Adsense is ‘text and image ads’ when setting up your ad block. I had switched to ‘image ads only’ for a few months and found clicks had dropped from their normal rate of ‘rarely’ to ‘never’ for the duration. About a month ago I switched them to ‘text ads only’ and have started to see those pennies rolling in again. (I should be able to retire in the year 2875! )

If you want people to click on ads they must be related to the topic the reader is visiting for. If your blog is about electronics or other popular topics of image ads then you’ll likely do alright with with them. Otherwise, I find ‘text ads only’ is the way to go.

I’m thinking Adsense and similar programs should be thought of as stepping stones anyway. Once your blog reaches a Google Page Rank (PR) of 4 or better there are much better ways to utilize your ad space. I can only hope to achieve such ranking so I can blog about those choices at some point.

Advertising Adsense, Google