Picking a browser is like choosing a home repair store. You develop a habit of using one and stop thinking about the alternatives. Chrome is definitely a faster browser than Firefox in our use, delivering a payoff in the “time is money” formula. If you browse a lot, Chrome could be an upgrade. (Safari’s performance is much closer to Chrome’s)

But Chrome’s got some steps to catch up in other areas. In the Mac version we downloaded this week, some Web sites aren’t working completely. Our TypePad account editor (where we publish the 3000 NewsWire blog) won’t let us resize graphics for posts in Chrome. The editing features at the Constant Contact email site also won’t perform with Chrome for the Mac, either.

This puts Chrome in a category with the iPad: very fast and slick for consumption of information. Not so good for creating messages and more. As for the death of Firefox, that obituary shouldn’t be written yet. 350 million users won’t expire overnight.

The Firefox obit is based on the browser’s development resources, according to Infoworld’s writers. Firefox has said it will be releasing fewer interim security fixes in the future. Infoworld predicts that Chrome users will see more fix releases since it’s more open.

Security is important, even crucial to some kinds of business. And attacks through your browser are becoming commonplace now. But Chrome has no more defenses for scripting attacks than Firefox today. These are the hardest to engineer against. I wouldn’t hold the Firefox security against it at the moment.

Incredible Start Page

Chrome’s got a wide array of extensions available. One of the more interesting is the Incredible Start Page, billed as “A new, customizable start page for Chrome. Easily find your favorite bookmarks and closed tabs. Take notes as you browse.” This is the sort of customization that Firefox won’t have, it appears. Whether you find everything that you’re already using in Firefox, or your extensions for Safari, remains as an exercise. We’ve gotten the Xmarks bookmark synchronizer installed on Chrome — a good first step in making a browser transition.

PC users have been switching to Macs for many reasons, and easier use is among the leaders. An article from the Software Advice marketing Web site makes good cases for why Mac-based Electronic Medical Records (EMR) software is ready to help in healthcare. The article lists on-the-Mac solutions, then goes on to track the software hosted offsite, but available to Mac users.

Web-based EMR software is a growing segment of the market and one that is appealing to physicians in a wide range of specialties. Because web-based EMRs don’t depend on a specific operating system, a physician needs to only have a compatible web browser (Safari or Firefox for example) on their Mac to access the software online. There’s no installation of software on a physical machine; all data is hosted in the “cloud.”

The number of web-based EMR vendors is rising but only a handful have optimized their software to run on a Mac-based web-browser. The Software Advice site points to demo versions of these applications.

We’ve reviewed the guide for securing WiFi, for example, and invested in our own copies of the Snow Leopard guides (Upgrading, Exploring and Customizing the newest OS version), the AirPort networking guide (essential if you set up an office net without yards and yards and cables) and even something as complicated and powerful as permissions.

From that last guide I got a tip on FileExaminer, a dandy $10 utility that sets permissions on files so you can transfer music and photos from one system to another without the vexing “permissions not sufficient” error box.

Take Control guides are written by the staff of TidBits, one of the very best Mac resources online. Tonya and Adam Engst have run the company for years as man and wife, a combination that delivers a broader range of strategies.

The guides, delivered as PDF files, cost as little as $5 in the current 50 percent off sale. It’s hard to find a better value for training.

The business-related programs are

• Write Room, which provides a clutter-free screen for writing without distractions. Not easy to get something written with all those Web pages, e-mails and Facebook feeds all around you.
• Tiny Grab, which snaps screen shots off of your Mac and plants them in your clipboard. Very handy for posting to a blog or a, yeah, Twitter/Facebook page.
• Then there’s Mariner Write, a full-featured word processor-writing suite that is an alternative to Microsoft Word. It also saves in Word format. The catch here is that 500,000 people have to download the rest of the programs for Mariner Write to be “unlocked.” It usually happens. In the meantime, five other programs are already unlocked and ready to use.

Take a poke into mac.alltop.com to see how many sites, organized by expertise, are reporting and analyzing what’s happening this week. Many have RSS feeds to let you stay current, once you find one that fills your needs Alltop also operates education aggregation pages, as well as ones for photo creatives.