Chrome Dump

For well over two months, I've been using Google Chrome in place of Firefox as my primary browser. I was quite impressed with it from the beginning. Two months on, the euphoria has faded. I still have a lot of good things to say about it. But some of the quibbles got on my nerves to the point that I just can't put up with them anymore. The biggest annoyance, by far, is a weird bug that happens when working with text areas. I do a lot of posting in blog comments and programming forums. I frequently encounter an issue where the caret and any edits I make (typing, deleting, cutting, whatever) are invisible when I move to a new line. The first line remains visible, but everything after is never seen. It's all there, though. Highlighting all of the text, either with the mouse or with Ctrl-A, makes it visible. Then the problem starts again on the next new line. Since this happens everytime I post on a forum that I moderate, I'm really fed up with it. I also have problems with both the Java and Flash plugins. Sometimes, Java applets and Flash videos just fail to load. When I view the same links in Firefox, all is as it should be. I don't deal with applets much, but I do watch a lot of Flash videos as a result of visiting Reddit every day. When ~20% of them fail to load, I get annoyed. Another issue I have isn't so much a fault of Chrome as it is a result of my being spoiled. I had gotten so used to using the FlashGot plugin in Firefox that downloading large files in Chrome is excruciating. The other day I was downloading a hefty software development kit that really drove me over the edge. I decided to start using Firefox for large downloads. And that made me realize just how much more often I was already using Firefox. I was already using it to write blog posts, since I use the wonderful ScribeFire plugin for Firefox. I also have been frequently opening it to watch Flash videos. These days, I've even been launching it to visit certain forums where I know I'll probably be making a post, in order to avoid the text area bug. If I'm going to start using it for large downloads as well, I may as well just move back to it completely. Though it may seem that the title of this post reflects the fact that I'm dumping Chrome, it actually has another purpose. Chrome Dump is the name of a nice little utility someone wrote in order to handle some features that Chrome is lacking. When I decided to switch back to Firefox, I thought I would take my Chrome bookmarks with me. As it turns out, Chrome offers no bookmark export feature. How they overlooked that one I can't even guess. Chrome Dump with read the bookmark database for you and export it to an HTML file that can then be imported into FF (or any other browser that can import HTML bookmarks). Chrome Dump can also clear your browsing history, another feature that doesn't seem to have made it into Chrome yet. I'm sure Chrome will improve with age, assuming Google continues to put an effort into it. For now though, I just don't have the patience for it. I'll come back to it somewhere down the road and reevaluate.
  1. Jan 9th, 2012 at 12:26 | #1

    Google Chrome has improved. It has been improving for a long time, now. Google has now come out with the new “Chromebook” meant for browsing the web.
    I haven’t used the
    Chromebook yet, but I would like to try it out.

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