In case you haven’t heard, Google Chrome is Google’s latest open-source offering: a standards-compliant browser. The reason I’m interested in it is that it runs each tab as its own process. If I’m browsing two sites and one causes a crash, the other one doesn’t go down, as well. It also helps with memory management, theoretically keeping the overall memory use more appropriate after a long session of internet use.The reason Google is interested in developing Chrome is that it wants more control over how its Apps (especially Google Docs/Spreadsheets/etc.) are presented. If a silly flash arcade site crashes your browser while you’re taking a break from writing the next great novel in Google Docs, you’ll be rightly frustrated. The one-process-per-tab approach ensures that this won’t happen, paving the way for Google Docs to attain higher acceptance.Things that currently annoy me about Google Chrome:
- Quicksearch. I can’t right click in a field and make it a quicksearch option. In Firefox, I can right click in, say, the PHP search field and save that to a keyword, such as “php”. Then, if I want to search for the PHP function ‘asort’, I just type “php asort” in the address bar and it will take me right there. I can’t (yet) do this in Chrome.
- Scrolling. In Firefox, my mouse is properly detected, allowing me to scroll slowly and smoothly, or quickly, depending on how I accelerate the mouse. In Chrome, the scrolling is overly “sensitive”, causing my scrolling to move much too quickly.
- Tabs. When I middle-click on a link for the first time, it opens in a new tab. But when I middle click again on a link, it opens in the same tab that was just opened by my first middle click. Firefox gets this right by default: each new middle click opens up a new tab.
That’s it for now. More to come later.
Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, google, google chrome, internet explorer, mozilla, mozilla firefox
“We are so, so happy with Google Chrome,” mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. “That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement.” – http://notnews.today.com/?p=57
My theory: This is Google’s first user acquisition step in their quest for creating an “internet of things”. Thus, if you have this browser which can run more complex computer programs, then you can easily put a platoform onto, say, a television that can run applications, surf the web, and watch tv (google already hosts television ads, and they don’t charge you if the viewer skips out in less than 5 seconds of viewing the commercial)
So this sort of software development could lead to some reeeally cool stuff down the line.
about quicksearch:
The feature is somehow built-in, if you happen to have quicksearch in your firefox profile bookmarks, once those bookmarks are imported to chrome you’ll notice how you can keep using your keywords to quicksearch. That’s the only way I manage to use quicksearch.