Browser Shifts

I usually use IE8 on my notebook. It's a decent browser, and much better than the dark days of IE6. Despite some unwarranted MS hate from people, it serves well for using the internet. I have all four major browsing engines on my machine (IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome for WebKit) so I can do cross-browser development, but generally I just use one for daily use. 

Lately, though, on my machine, it hasn't been serving so well for typing on the internet. Out of nowhere, and with no relation to anything I can figure out, it started randomly skipping characters as I typed. Spaces and letters would vanish and I would have to continually edit my text as I typed a lot more than I should have. I thought it was something related to my G15, but it did the same thing on the 1530's keyboard when I typed with that. I thought it was something plugin related, and turned them off, but it continued. I haven't been able to figure it out.

This started around the same time Google announced Google Chrome OS. It's built on Linux, but the Linux build of Chrome does not have all the features it needs yet, so it's still going to be a while before it releases. In the mean time, all of Google Chrome is moving forward in development continually, with constant changes to the backend Chromium project. Since they're working on an Extensions system currently, I decided to switch to the Dev branch of Google Chrome and use that more often. It's working for me, and I can type just fine, however the lack of good updated access to the Google Toolbar Favorites system doesn't help things much.

So at this point, now I'm using both Google Chrome and IE8 regularly in the day. Chrome for forum use and anything else I need to be able to type with, such as here on the blog, and IE8 for reading news sites and all my Google Toolbar bookmarks. The system works well enough for me like that.