Chrome: not so shiny?
Written by Alex Kidman Saturday, 12 December 2009 04:20
I'm old enough (or decrepit enough) to remember running Mosaic on a Mac. Sometimes, that makes me weep, but what it does most of the time is remind me that browsers come and browsers go. And I've pretty much used them all.
This week, Google released a beta version of its highly-hyped Chrome web browser for Mac OS X. It's built on the same WebKit framework that underpins Safari, and is said to be rather spiffy and fast — and that's certainly the experience I've had running it on other operating systems.
I'd been using one of the nightly developer builds of the Mac client for a while. Well, I say "using", but "it's been installed and I've dipped in and out of it a few times" would be a fairer description. There are times when Firefox (my browser of choice — I could never get on with Safari all that well outside its ability to play Quake Live) was playing up and I needed to check it on another browser — and that's pretty much what I used the developer builds of Chrome to do. I wanted to give Chrome a full fair chance given this week's beta was pretty much the first "public" release of the browser, so when it launched and told me it wasn't my default browser, I told it to rectify this forthwith! And so began my three-day journey ...
No, wait, that was Weird Al Yankovic's trek to the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. I know that because of the omnibar feature in Chrome that lets me search automatically for things, and then tries to autocomplete it. Surprisingly, I had to type all the way to "in" before it automatically suggested "Minnesota". How many large balls of twine are there out there, anyway?
Loads, as it happens.
Anyway, after three days of dedicated usage, I'm not quite sold on Chrome as it stands. Sure, "sold" is a relative term given that all the major browsers are free these days, but there's still mindshare and even just learning user-interface tricks to keep in mind. And I'm well aware that the Mac client is still in beta stage, and there are tools that could be improved. Amongst those I'd put on my wishlist are:
Bookmark management. It's absent, and noted as such. You can import bookmarks from Safari or Firefox, but not export them back, or particularly edit them. For some obscure reason, Google Chrome has decided that the link to my own blog — at www.alexkidman.com — should be displayed in my toolbar as www.alexkidman.con. Does it know something I don't? Either way, I can't actually change it. Editing it reveals the correct URL, and the link works — but it's ugly and wrong in its visual presentation.
Stability. OK, again, it's a beta, and it could work better. Still, it crashes quite a bit, and for anything important it's not yet stable enough to use. Heck, for anything trivial it's a bit irritating to be told that Chrome's crashed yet again.
Speed. This one surprised me, and I ran some tests head-to-head with my extension-heavy Firefox installation. Chrome's meant to be very good with AJAX- and Javascript-heavy pages, and there's certainly no shortage of those, but for my regular day to day browsing activities I found Firefox was rendering pages that little bit quicker than Chrome was. Not by huge amounts, except in cases where Chrome would hang for a little while, but still by enough to be noticeable.
The omnibar. It does work, but I can't help but be a little creeped-out by Google autocompleting searches in rather weird ways. You can get the same effect by just going to Google and typing in random phrases, but when it's the main search area of the browser, I get more antsy. Moreover, I miss the ability to add multiple search engines to the browser, the way I can in Firefox.
Most of these issues could naturally enough be ironed out in a future and final release, and I could learn to live with the omnibar .Hopefully the final release will also see the Mac version incorporate Google Chrome Extensions, which launched for the PC version this week. At least until that time, though, it's back to Firefox for me.
Which Mac browser do you use, and why? Discuss it with me at MacTheForum!
