I felt like posting, but without anything major to post, I figured I would do a follow up to my Saturnalia post. I had originally meant to use Chrome for 6 days, but barely made it past two days. Simply put, the bads outweighed the goods. I even jumped over to Firefox to see if I could make that jump, and while much closer, it still isn't quite as good as the experience I am accustomed to. I am going to break this up into a different areas, the deal breakers and the annoyances.
Deal Breakers
The deal breakers are things Chrome (and some other browsers) needs as standard functionality, ie without extensions, addons, or pluggins. I don't really feel like these are limited to my personal preference. They are more, once you use them, you can't really go back. It is basic functionality that are obvious.
Closing the last tab: When closing open tabs, once the last tab is closed, the browser closes. All the major browsers do this except for Opera (though there is an addon for Firefox to prevent it from doing it), and every time I finish reading the last tab I have open and close it only to have the browser close, a little bit of bile bubbles up. I find this behavior vaguely forgivable in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, their 'blank' tabs are, well, blank. Chrome on the other hand, has this fairly spiffy page that lets you revisit/view previously closed tabs, your history, your bookmarks, and anything you pinned to the page. It makes a great start page, but you only get to see it if you open a new tab. So if you are done reading your current tab and want the spiffy start page, you have to open a new tab before you close your current one. Lame.
Tab area/new tabs: This one is a little picky, but I feel it is apt. Normally, when you double click on the empty area on the tab bar, you get a new tab. It is one of the few things that all the major players seem to agree on. In Chrome, it maximizes/minimizes the browser. And yes, I know they 're-engineered' the title bar blah blah, not enough room blah blah... The Opera 10.5 pre-alpha can do it...and it is a pre-alpha.
Proxy Settings: Chrome (and Safari and Internet Explorer) use the windows proxy settings instead of its own. Normally this isn't a big deal, but some apps use the Internet Explorer stuff to display their content, which makes having to change the system setting annoying.
Zero Tab Management: There is nothing here. No settings. No preferences. Nothing. Even if there was a single select box to open new tabs to the far right, I would have been satisfied, but giving no choice is backwards. (There is an extension to do this though.)
RSS ignorant: What is the use of having one of the better online RSS readers if the browser you build is RSS ignorant. Even if all you do is link the RSS feed to Google Reader, do something.
Annoynances
The annoyances are just that, annoyances. I have been using Opera for over a decade now, so I am used to getting new, innovative browser features long before other browsers (not that all the nifty stuff hits Opera first, just a lot of them). These are things I amused to and find it hard to live without.
No Gesture/Rocker support: Mouse gestures, for those who have never used them, are kind of like shortcuts for the mouse. Hold the right key down, move the cursor in a predetermined pattern, and something happens...like new tabs, navigation, zooming, etc. The rocker gestures are similar: hold the right button and click the left and you go Back, hold the left button and click the right and you go Forward. This is awesome when you don't have an external mouse when using a laptop. There are a couple of extensions to kind of make this work, but none are as nice.
Fast Forward: Fast Forward is a feature that reads over the source code of the page and tries to determine what the logical 'Next' page is if there isn't anything in you history. There are built in conventions for this in HTML via Meta tags, and these conventions have been around for a long time, but no one other than Opera seems to know this. If these tags are not on the page, Opera will look for links marked 'next', check the url for logical next pages, etc. Once you get used to this, it is hard to go without. And once you have Fast Forward working with Rocker gestures catching up on blogs, comics sites, and news sites is so much quicker. There are a couple of extensions that try to make this work, but none of them are really comprehensive enough to compare. Also, none of them work with the rocker extensions.
Shortcut customization: Have fat fingers and always hit ctrl+w when you mean ctrl+s? Yeah, me either, but it is nice to be able to reconfigure shortcuts to something you can remember or something you are more familiar with, especially if you are moving from one browser to another and everything is different. (And yes, there is an extension that covers a number of the shortcuts, but many you can't change)
Custom Searches: Custom searches are insanely useful. Are there sites you search on a daily basis? I know I do. There isn't a day I don't hit wikipedia and I find it much quicker to simple type w [search term] than loading up wikipedia then searching. Sure, it is only a few seconds, but when you do tons of searches it adds up. It also saves me having to remember the url of the site or tracking it down in my bookmark list (hundreds of bookmarks). Custom searches do exist in Chrome, but setting them up is non-intuitive. You can't add a search on your own, they are added after you leave a page you have used the search function on. Then it pops up under the Default Search window for customization. No clue why they hide this very cool feature.
Cool Things
My entire experience with Chrome wasn't bad. It is a nice browser, and will probably grow into something far more useful. There were some things I liked, so I will put them here.
New Tab Page: I mentioned this before, but I really like this page. I got used to Opera's Speed Dial, and while this doesn't duplicate all of its functionality, there is a lot it has that Opera doesn't. Not only can you pin pages here, but it also shows frequently visited pages, your 'bookmark bar', recently closed tabs, and history. You can also change from thumbnail to list view and both are very pleasant to look at.
History Page: Nothing really new here, but the presentation is really nice. The layout is simple, but still manages to separate your browsing sessions along with the days and times you visited sites.
Multi threads: This is one of those everybody mentions it features, but it is worth mentioning. Every tab and extension is opened as a separate thread so if one crashes it doesn't bring down the whole browser. Sure, I know this doesn't happen often, but normally when it does, it is the worst possible time for it to do so.
Speed/Startup: Another everybody mentions it feature, but Chrome is damned fast, especially starting up fresh. Opera reloads from cache faster, or seems to, but most pages seem to load faster for me in Chrome.
No Menu Bar: I liked when Internet Explorer ditched it, was pleased that Chrome did it, and I am happy to see that Opera will be in 10.5 (no clue on release date, hopefully by Q2 2010), and Firefox will in v4 (Q4 2010 to Q2 2011). Real estate is important to a browser, so the less clutter the browser has, the more viewing area the page has. Getting rid of the menu bar add just a little more viewing area.
I will keep tabs, and mess with all the major releases, but I doubt I will be doing another post like this. I was amused that while messing with Chrome, Firefox became more and more impressive. Most of the problems I had with Chrome could be worked around cleanly in Firefox via addons.
