Posts tagged Google
New and Improved Chrome
Dec 12th
Google has dropped the ‘beta’ from the Chrome browser in the latest release. I posted recently about my issues with the browser and why I was moving back to Firefox. Having updated to the newest version and tested it out briefly, it appears my major gripes are gone. The text area bug that annoyed me so much seems to have been squashed and every video I tested played without a hitch. There is now a bookmark manager, where individual bookmarks can easily be deleted and reordered. They now have an option to delete all of the entries in the browsing history for a single day, though there doesn’t appear to be a way to delete individual items and there are no options to delete a week’s or month’s worth of history as other browsers have.
The Google blog post regarding this version indicates that an extensions platform is under development for a future release. So it could be that the Firefox extensions I’ve come to depend upon could potentially be ported over (or alternatives developed). I think I may start using Chrome again from time to time. I’m not ready to go back to full-time browsing with it until I get a download manager extension for it, but I’m hoping that I’ll eventually be able to ditch Firefox for it. FF is a great browser, but Chrome just seems so shiny!
Chrome Dump
Nov 16th
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.
Google Chrome
Sep 3rd
Google has entered the web browser arena with Chrome, a browser based on the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari. Never a fan of Microsoft’s IE, I’ve been a diehard Firefox user for a few years. I did use Opera for a short while, but there’s something about it I never quite liked. It’s an aesthetic thing, I guess. I tried Safari shortly after it was made available on Windows, but it didn’t impress me much. What I’m saying here is that it would take a lot to get me to ditch Firefox.
So I downloaded Chrome today. I can say that after five minutes of using it I was hooked. It’s fast. Really, really fast. It does a lot of things differently than other browsers. For one, the ubiquitous search bar is no more, being integrated with the address bar. The default search engine is, of course, Google, but you can configure others. Typing anything in the bar will give you hints for both addresses and search terms. Tabs are handled differently as well. In other browsers, the tabs are run in a single process, but in Chrome each tab is run as a separate process (see this page if you don’t know what a computer process is).
Chrome also sports a blazingly fast JavaScript engine. If you use a lot of JavaScript-intensive web pages you should see a noticeable performance boost over other browsers. If all browsers on the market incorporate this kind of JavaScript engine, we should expect to see some innovative JavaScript applications appearing.
One minor feature that pleasantly surprised me was how it handled importing bookmarks from Firefox. It’s not uncommon for a browser to be able to import bookmarks from othe browsers. Chrome asked to import my Firefox bookmarks during installation. What surprised me, though, was that it recognized my bookmark keywords. Firefox allows you to set a keyword on a bookmark. Then, rather than going to the bookmark menu you can type the keyword in the address bar and press enter. Firefox will find the bookmark associated with the keyword and load that page. I have keywords, usually two or three letters, for the sites I visit most frequently. Chrome recognizes them and lists the site associated with the keyword at the top of the list of suggested sites and search terms (Firefox doesn’t actually list the site with the suggestions). Cool 
Another big feature is called ‘incognito browsing’. From the menu, you can open a new ‘incognito window’. Any site you visit in that window will not be recorded in the browser history and all cookies saved during that session will be deleted when the incognito window is closed. It’s about time a browser did something like this!
What I’m missing from Chrome are the plugins I frequently use in Firefox, such as ScribeFire (which I’m using right now for this post), PDF Download, FlashGot and StumbleUpon. I haven’t tried to download anything from Chrome yet, so I don’t know how it measures up to the download manager I use through FlashGot. That may be the thing I end up missing the most.
In the end, Chrome has supplanted Firefox as my default browser on Windows. Color me impressed.
