Hi Mick
Thanks for your email which i appreciated.
Installing Chrome was part of my hunt to find a better browser. I find Firefox 'hangs' after any lengthy browsing... it always seems to have done, i recall switching to Netscape back in about 2004/2005 because it was so bad and hasn't improved much in many ways. Seamonkey seems to have inherited some of that. I started looking for something better and wasn't too impressed by Epiphany which is supposed to be Debian's default browser [i think].
You could try opera. It isn't open source, or truly free in the "freedom" sense, but it is free of cost and it works well under linux. But beware here too of opera's ability to track your usage through its "opera turbo" option. This can be a useful option for speeding web browsing on a slow link, but it does this by pulling the data from opera's own caching proxy service. You pays your money....
Opera i really liked. The email client fastest of the ones i tried apart from Alpine which i now use some of the time - particlularly good for imap as one can remove certain labels like 'work', 'personal' that they've recently put into gmail. But the browser had problems with - certain page sections e.g. BBC/news flickering and moving... maybe a problem with xubuntu somehow - i don't know. So Chrome was the next on the list.
james