I’m a [ Chrome | Firefox | Opera ] user…

Over the last few months my browser usage switched from pure Chrome to a combination of Chrome, Firefox and Opera, all running on Fedora 16 (x86-64). This may sound a little odd, but when you see what I use them for it may not sound so wacky.

• Chrome: Used for anything Google (Gmail, Reader, Calendar, Google+ etc.) and general browsing.
• Firefox: Used for anything to do with administration of my website. I switched to Firefox because I found Chrome on Fedora to be a little glitchy when posting HTML forms. About 1 in 10 posts hang indefinitely. I don’t see this behaviour on Mac and I guess it doesn’t happen on Windows or I would have read about it, but it seems consistently annoying on Fedora. I thought at first it was something I had done, but it happens with phpBB, WordPress and my own admin pages. I get the same behaviour on multiple machines also. In contrast, Firefox performance seems very consistent.
• Opera: Since the whole Google social search stuff was introduced, I don’t really trust some Google searches when I’m logged in to my Google account. The search results seem too heavily weighted to my own website and those I visit on a regular basis. That’s fine if you never want to break out of your little circle of friends, but when I search I often want to venture into pastures new, not just keep visiting the same people. Since Chrome and Firefox are always logged in to my Google account, I use Opera as my impartial browser.

So now I’m a triple-browser guy.

Interested to know:

• Has anyone else seen this hanging issue on Chrome? I’ve Googled for answers, but anything that sounds remotely relevant seems to relate to bugs in old versions.
• Has anyone got a clever solution for the Google account issue? I don’t want to repeatedly log out and in, but if there is a more obvious solution I would like to hear it.

Cheers

Tim…

Update: Colin ‘t Hart mentioned the Incognito Window in Google Chrome. It does seem to give the correct (non-social) serach results, but it is a separate window, so not sure if it is a better approach than running Opera. Kinda like the complete separate of running Opera, but worth thinking about though.