I’m an avid fan of Google’s Chrome browser. I have several different profiles in use and as much as I never thought something could replace Firefox as my go-to browser, Chrome did. The one thing I’ve never really liked about Chrome, though, is that some downloads seemed to max out at 2MB/s. Most recently, this was true for my seedbox-like downloads using my Linksnappy account, but I’ve seen it time and time again. Which, 2MB/s download speeds are great when you have a 20Mpbs or less internet connection, but I don’t, mine is faster. I wanted to download files faster, and I figured out how to do just that.
When I was looking for Chrome tweaks or settings hacks that I could apply to either increase the max connections or just to download files faster in chrome, through that rabbit trail of research I stumbled on a Chromium-based browser, Citrio. Citrio apparently has a download manager built into it. Which, given that I have repeatedly seen the soft 2MB/s cap on Chrome downloads:
Screenshot from Linksnappy Torrent Downloader Tool Review
And then after switching to Citrio, consistently seeing 6MB/s+ download speeds:
Regularly seeing 6MB/s+ download speeds from Linksnappy using Citrio
I am a believer. Which, my theoretical maximum download speed for this ISP is around 8MB/s, so I’m quite happy getting 6MB/s downloads.
Citrio – more than just faster Chrome downloads
This really isn’t meant to be a promotional post for Citrio, rather I see it as an alternative to Google’s Chrome browser, but… I’m pretty pleased with my switch so far. While there are probably many more perks to using Citrio over Chrome, I was pleasantly surprised to see that when I downloaded a video using a premium download service, that the video actually played right inside a tab on the browser:
Honestly, that kind of amazed me. I did almost no research on Citrio itself, rather I just downloaded it to try out some download links to see if the speeds improved compared to with Chrome, and they did. The built-in video player was like icing on the cake.
A true Chrome browser alternative / replacement
The reason why Citrio is now my default browser is because it can integrate with your Google account, just like Chrome, and therefore sync your addons, extensions, bookmarks and so forth just like happens with Chrome. What’s more, for me personally, my primary Chrome profile would not stay in sync with my Google account and I constantly had to re-login, which didn’t usually work unless I detached and re-attached my account to a Chrome instance. That was annoying. With Citrio, so far anyway, I’ve logged in to my Google account once and things have stayed connected as I assume they’re supposed to be.
In any case, if you’re currently using Google Chrome but you’re looking for something a bit different, or you’ve been wanting to increase your download speeds while using Chrome (provided you have the bandwidth to do so), I recommend checking out Citrio.
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