I use Chrome for personal surfing. It’s just less cluttered and feels faster.
For the record, I don’t use many extensions.
However, for the purpose of debugging web-sites, I use Firefox.
I like Chrome’s incognito mode. It doesn’t clutter your system by storing browser history that you end up deleting anyway.
Presumably something made you think I missed that?
I used to be a FF supporter till recently.
I tried Safari for a bit, before changing over to Chrome.
Chrome is faster and sleeker. I don’t like the font rendering, but it was easily remedied.
So I decided to give Chrome a chance, once again. I haven’t tried it since its initial release. I don’t like it. Where the hell is the bookmarks button? I have to open a new tab before I can get to them. And how do I switch the search engine after typing in the address bar? Opera has a search bar that can let me easily switch search engines. Hell, I have multiple search bars in Opera, just to save me a second or two to search my most used sites. I don’t like Chrome, it doesn’t feel like a complete web browser to me.
There is a bookmarks bar.
And why would you need to switch search engines?
I have to open a new tab to get to my bookmarks. That annoys me.
I am constantly searching things on Youtube and Imdb and Wikipedia, and many other sites. Being able to easily switch between them in my search bar is convenient for me. In fact, I find myself searching Wikipedia and Youtube so often, I just gave them their own search bars in Opera. I didn’t see any way to do that with Chrome.
This is my biggest hurdle to switching to Chrome. I’m a fan of simplified designed, but I LIKE the separate search bar. For example, I see a movie on TV, and with just a few clicks I can easily switch between searching for information on Wikipedia and IMDB, clips on YouTube, check and see if it’s on Netflix, if not I can check Amazon, or maybe a few pirating sites, etc.
Are there any extensions to add the search box (with multiple search options) to Chrome? Any search I try only leads me to changing Firefox search to be more like Chrome.
Also, I can’t seem to get it to import my Firefox passwords.
The browser bar is right below the omnibar and stores the links that I use so often that I saved them there. On the right it says Other Bookmarks. I click that and I get the links I’ve bookmarked and saved just in the bookmarks file. No opening a ne tab necessary.
Site specific searching? Easy peasy. Say I want to search for something on youtube and youtube only. I start typing youtube and by the time I’ve hit Y, on the right of the omnibar it says Press TAB to search Youtube Video Search. It only works, though, if you’ve already searched for something via the site’s own search function. But you only have to do that once and you can search just one site from the omnibar. Because Chrome is awesome, like that.
OK, I see I have to enable it to always show bookmarks bar.
As for searching. I see what you said works for youtube. Typing in “y” shows “Search Youtube” at the bottom of the address bar. But it doesn’t seem to work for The Straight Dope or other forums I visit. I can add SDMB’s search into Opera’s search bar.
I will say that Chrome does seem to render web pages a little bit faster than Opera.
I’ve been using Chrome as my primary browser since launch because of its speed and clean interface.
My biggest complaint by far is that Google has generally been slow to add requested features and fix bugs. Most things have been added by this point, but people have been asking for a print preview feature for years and I’m pretty sure it still hasn’t been included.
My biggest pet peeve on this front won’t make a lot of sense to most of you, but Chrome fails to render Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters differently, something which makes browsing pages in Japanese obnoxious. They’ve been “working” on the issue since 2008.
I try many different browsers and had been a long time Mozilla/Firefox user but when Chrome arrived it somehow became my preferred browser really fast. In my opinion the most important qualities in a browser are that it should be fast and not intrusive. Someone made an apt analogy - The browser is the window to the internet and should be as spotless as possible. The one thing I really miss from Firefox is the syncing between desktop and mobile editions.
I still check out Firefox, Opera and even IE but their versions don’t stick. I’m grateful they exist though since browser development go stale if there’s no competition.
Yeah, great for surfing porn. Honestly, who are they kidding? They should have just called it Porn Mode.
Though of course Firefox has the analogous “private browsing mode”, but the big annoyance with that is that rather shitty feature that you can’t have one regular window and one private window open at the same time (I’m sure there’s some add-on or hack to fix that, but I’m lazy and I want to complain that the default shouldn’t be like that, damnit!). +1 for Chrome again.
I think this is what you’re looking for.
Never mind. I should keep reading before writing replies.
I use it to have two gmail addresses open at the same time.
The Chrome download page wouldn’t work for me in FF, so had to use IETab. The installer runs, but there’s no option to choose a install dir. Anyway, shortly after it’s “Installation failed” with a link to troubleshoot it. This link leads to blank page on Google’s server. Also, the installer phones home after failing.
All addressable problems I’m sure, but not worth the trouble to essentially replicate what I have now, assuming all my extensions have Chrome equivalents.
Lots of mentions of the clean interface of Chrome compared to the clutter of Firefox. As a lifelong IE user who is potentially browser-curious, could you guys maybe post a couple screenshots of both to imageshack? (Free to upload, no registration necessary.)
Here is what my IE8 interface looks like. It’s pretty clean, IMO, but then again it has to be since I run 800x600. (A couple more shots: Accelerators and Favorites. I hated the new Favorites bar at first, but now I’m rather fond of it. It has a sturdier, “tonka toy” feel compared to just having the favorites be a menu.)
You could probably have googled this yourself, or just downloaded them and tried them.
But here’s how they appear to me on my OS. I changed my resolution down to 800x600 for you. These browsers will appear different depending on how you set the browsers up, what addons you use and what OS you use.
Firefox
http://i.imgur.com/iEICJ.png
Opera. I know you didn’t ask, but since I have it installed, it was no trouble
Chromium. Chrome is based on Chromium, so it should be pretty similar.
Please remember this is how they appear to me, on my OS, with my settings using my addons.
I’d rather not install software I don’t have to. It didn’t occur to me to google them, but if it had I probably wouldn’t have anyway because I’m more curious about how they look “in the wild” as opposed to running with default settings.
Sweet, thanks much, that’s exactly what I was hoping for. I totally get the comments about the clean interface of Chrome; that’s pretty enticing, actually. It’s too bad they don’t have a search providers bar, which is one of the new features of IE8 that I’ve grown to love. Can it at least do accelerators?