Zzzz

03 Sep

Chrome

So Google surprised everybody again by releasing a browser that works surprisingly well for a beta. Having somewhat of a future personal interest in the matter (cough) I had to try it.

Initial impressions after less than an hour:

  • It works. This is a big one, but really, websites and flash/videos work out of the box and that’s a good thing.
  • The interface is nice, a lot of it is a straightforward copy of FF3 (including the remember-password interface which I liked, and the insta-search in bookmarks/history). There are not a lot of options/customizability at first, I suppose this is in line with the G philosophy.
  • DOM inspector / JS debugger: I didn’t look at these in detail but I see they’re there along with other dev tools, looks useful.
  • tab bar on top: I thought this would annoy me but it’s done tastefully enough not to bother me. (I really dislike IE7’s layout, for example)
Things I don’t like:
  • ADS. Just no. It desperately needs an Adblock of some kind, I’m sure it’s possible even though there’s no apparent extensibility at first glance. After years of FF+adblock I just can’t go back to a web with annoying ads cluttering up my flamewars and lols.
  • No mouse gestures (yet?) – The one I especially want is hold right button + scrollwheel to cycle through tabs, plus a close tab gesture. I hope these will be added later…
  • I could list all the other extensions that I miss, but yeah, an interface/gallery like FF’s Add-ons would be ideal
  • The search engine defaulted to google.co.jp (based on download geolocation I guess?) with no option to change it, even though the browser is otherwise set to English everywhere else. I want .com since .jp prioritizes moonspeak results. There’s no way to change the default other than manually adding my own entry for .com and setting that as the default search.
  • Task manager: yes, it’s nice to know which web page is “using up resources”, but what then? It’s usually a page with video running, so I can decide to stop watching or put up with it. I can see how it’s a good tool, but G seems to be putting too much emphasis on it, and it encourages the same type of OCD memory-usage-checking behavior that people were doing with firefox (DURR HURR IT ARE EATING UP MY RAMS!!1 I HAEV 2 GIGABYTES BUT EVERY BIT MUST BE ACCOUNTED FOR!!!! DURRRRR WUTS A CACHE!????)
  • just read the /g/ thread for a bunch of other worthwhile complaints I hadn’t come across yet, most of them reasonable

So Chrome won’t be replacing Firefox for me for the time being, but I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on it (probably will have to eat dogfood and follow the party line sooner or later, lol)

Edit: shit I’m late for work :0

Edit 2: bonus points for about:internets (it’s a series of tubes!)

Edit 3: incognito, moar like porn mode

3 Responses to “Chrome”

  1. 1
    D. Says:

    Shall I take it as an “answer” for my question regarding Chrome?

  2. 2
    D. Says:

    That`s how Index evaluated Chrome:

    http://index.hu/tech/szoftver/chrm080902/

  3. 3
    D. Says:

    Basically positive reactions:

    http://webisztan.blog.hu/2008/09/03/chrome_elso_benyomasok

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