quuxpad

October 2, 2008: Google's Chrome: observations

I have been using Google’s new Chrome web browser since its release, which was a month ago today. So it’s time to put together a few thoughts!

Let me start off by saying, I am not a Firefox person. I haven’t put much thought into the reasons for this; it’s just a personal preference of mine. So this article will compare Chrome to IE7, which I have been using since it came out, and more recently, IE8 beta 2, which I started using on the day it released.

Things I like about Chrome:

• Chrome does sometimes hang, but usually for less than a minute, and it always recovers. By comparison, IE7/8 hung on me about every other day, and quite often never did fully recover.
• Chrome usually closes nearly instantly. IE can sometimes take several minutes to close.
• Chrome new tabs open instantly. I have seen IE take 15 seconds or more to open a new tab.
• Pages seem to load faster in most cases. Not all cases though! I still find myself waiting on a page-load - usually because the banner advertisement has not yet loaded.
• I’ve really come to enjoy Chrome’s single address bar. I type searches into it directly, and it is very fast to suggest sites and autocomplete words I am typing - often successfully.

The speed and stability of Chrome have kept me using it as my main browser for the past 30 days. I do have some gripes, listed below, but I have found that speed and stability are more important (to me) than I previously thought they were! Even with the long list of gripes I am about to list, I still prefer Chrome, and use it as my primary browser. I only open IE for the occasional task (like writing this post) that Chrome doesn’t yet handle as well as I like.

Things I am unhappy about (in Chrome):

• Scrolling is sometimes broken. if I click in the whitespace of the scrollbar, intending to scroll down one screen, it often keeps scrolling down until I move the cursor out of that scrollbar. This can be really annoying!
• Video clips often do not work correctly. They often do not play at all, or play only a few seconds and then stop. I have seen this happen in several video applets - YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
• Chrome does not always create a new process for each tab. Sometimes two or more tabs share the same process, as shown here:
  
  Chrome’s task Manager, showing two tabs in one process.
• I really miss the ‘quick tabs’ view from IE7/8. Very often I have a lot of tabs open, and I loved using the thumbnail view in IE7/8 to see them all, and close the ones I no longer need. Chrome does have a list view of all open tabs (press Shift + Esc to open Chrome’s task manager, a small snippet of which is shown above), but it is not as handy as IE7/8’s quick tabs. It is clear that Chrome has the code to do this, because you get a similar thumbnail view when you open a new tab - but the thumbnails are of ‘most visited’ sites, not currently open sites.
  
    IE quicktabs                                            Chrome new tab
  
• Chrome doesn’t always render edit controls well. For instance, here on Tumblr, when I edit or create a post, I see the following:
  
  Chrome (above) gives only a few buttons
  
  
  IE (above) showing all of the edit control buttons on Tumblr 
   
  
• Chrome loses my cookies whenever I restart it. This can be very annoying on sites like Techmeme or PopUrls, where preferences are saved in cookies, and those preferences define the way the sites act for me. I have to reset my preferences to sites like this every time I restart Chrome!
• When you shutdown Chrome, it saves all open tabs, and brings them back next time Chrome is opened. So far so good, right? But what I want is the ability to save tab-sets as favorites; Chrome has no way to do this.
• Even after a month, I want the page reload icon at the right side of the address bar; not on the left where Chrome places it. I still find myself mousing to the upper right, then correcting for upper left.
• Chrome’s file download strategy is weird, counterintuitive,  and sometimes broken. Many downloads open a new, blank page, where the download will appear as an icon in a footer at the bottom of the page. I must then click on this download to open it (such downloads are often PDFs). I must also click a little ‘x’ at the right side of the footer to close that footer. If I close the the blank tab-with-footer before using that ‘x’ to remove the footer, this footer then remains in some or all of my other tabs, and cannot be removed. Some unspecified amount of time later, the footer disappears on its own.

There you have it: a short list of really important Chrome advantages, and a much longer list of Chrome drawbacks. Yet still I prefer Chrome for most of my daily web browsing. I hope the Google folks are aware of these drawbacks, and working on them!