Not sure about the tabs. I keep winding up with empty “New Tab” tabs at the top. And that “+” tab keeps mocking me up there, I can hit Control-T much faster than clicking on that little button. Make it go away.
Also posting from Chrome. I love the clean UI. Can’t wait to see the add-ons that develop. The memory allocation seems to be about the same as Firefox, but if it releases the way the comic indicated, it’ll be that much more of an improvement.
Another road tester here. (I do internal IT support, so I need to get a sense of how it works before idiot users start calling me to complain it doesn’t work with the corporate resources.)
Initial impression: Nice, though not quite ready for prime time. Very slick, very responsive. Elegant and stripped-down like most of Google’s other work. Definitely of a piece with their aesthetic. However, it isn’t really a killer app; it does what a browser should do, but it’s not such a radically improved reinvention that people will come swarming to it in droves.
Also, because it’s new, it doesn’t have the feature richness that Firefox has, and it’s hugely lacking in terms of flexibly customizing the user experience. The open source approach means those plugins will come sooner rather than later, but for now it’s noticeably lean. Of course, as those plugins proliferate, the speed will drop considerably, I expect.
Not yet worth making the switch for, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.
My initial impression is good. But does anyone else find the copy and paste capability does not work?
I’ve been thinking about switching but I am such a glutton for punishment for Opera. Compatibility, support, stability, memory usage all suck, but the little things that Opera does right - and there are lots of them - make using any other browser so annoying. Other browsers have closed the gap with things like tabs*, but they’ve got a long way to go.
*To those who think tabbed browsing is new, or that Firefox invented it: Opera has been doing it a looooong time, and still does it best.
Aww, they don’t have a linux version yet.
I copy-pasted your text so it works for me, but I don’t care for the fact that it highlights everything rather than just text. On the other hand holding down shift and using the arrow keys to select text doesn’t appear to function correctly; it sometimes stops selecting for me.
I’ve got mixed feelings so far. I don’t like the forced home page since as far as I can tell its not directly customizable. I do like the interface style due to the fact that it opened up more screen area for the browser but they’re hiding all the functions so when I need to do something I have to poke around and play “Guess what the developer was thinking!”. I’ve seen performance occasionally slip when switching threads/tabs (I was fiddling with dragging tabs and then switched back to this one and it stalled for a second).
Right now I think I’m going to stick with Firefox at least until an ad blocker plug in is available and they’ve gone through a few more revisions.
I don’t have it open in front of me but I was able to customize my homepage using one of the links to the right of the address bar and options. I used it for about 20 minutes right as it came out. And until I can use my mouse gestures, adblock and cooliris I think I will stay with Firefox. It did use less CPU though under the minimal testing I did anyway.
I read through the entire comic book last night and I was super excited to download and try it today, but I’ve been rather non-plussed by it.
First off, it is shockingly fast and so-far stable. I think running tabs as separate processes and the new V8 Java engine are fantastic, but the UI is terrible. To start with, the “omnibar” or whatever is a pain in the ass. It occasionally has trouble distinguishing URL’s from search entries, and if you try search terms inside of URL’s you’ve already used it doesn’t work well. Worst of all, it does fully automatic completion rather than suggesting you to arrow down to the auto-complete entry you want and it’s been as exasperating as trying to get Microsoft Word 2000 to back-the-fuck-off when you don’t want the auto complete functions. I cannot discover how to change search providers without going to settings which seriously hampers the ability to use the omni-bar. Simply breaking out URL’s and searches and putting a search-provider drop down is still probably the best solution.
From top to bottom it’s missing user-customization. You can set the homepage to about:blank, but there’s no way to get out of the “new tab” page. Having to look at your 9 most visited websites every time you open a tab is an annoyance that there really ought to be able to avoid.
Also, Flash works, but there’s no sound. Hulu, Youtube, etc. are all pretty much worthless without it.
To my mind, the most egregious sin of all for the new browser is a lack of keyboard compatibility as far as I can find. Most of the keyboard shortcuts from IE still work, but when I hit the alt-key, nothing pops up, nothing is underlined. How do you access the settings via the keyboard or a screen-reader? Also, a lot of the notifications that pop-up at the top of the screen like “Save this password?” are also not keyboard accessible so far as I can find. My sister is blind, so perhaps I’m more sensitive to these issues than most, but as Target has learned earlier this year, it really isn’t acceptable for computers to simply ignore accessibility issues. Also, I prefer to avoid the mouse entirely if possible, and Chrome doesn’t seem to permit that.
So, I see a lot of hope and it could be the basis for a great browser (and it should be given that it’s open source), but the user-interface is shockingly half-baked for a release two years in the making and ostensibly widely tested within Google.
Oh yeah, and you can’t right click on a picture and set it as a desktop background. I like to set NYTimes photos as my new background every two to three days and I can’t do that with Chrome. Also, you can only download and save, not just open downloads from a temporary file that cleans up after itself. Another rather significant annoyance if you like to open a lot of downloads without saving them to your desktop and opening them from there.
It’s nice looking, it’s clean, it’s Beta.
Wake me up when they have something worth losing Firefox for.
I downloaded and could save without opening, then I ran. Then I used,
Then I un-installed.
Interesting, but it appears to be the 16 year old catholic cheerleader of browsers, lot’s o’promise, lets let it develop and see how it runs.
Posting from it right now. It is ***blazingly ***fast…but I keep trying to use all of my Firefox add-ons that aren’t there…
I’m quite interested to see how Chrome develops in the coming months…
Do I have to think naughty thoughts about it that I know I shouldn’t? 
After a bit more work with it I find that it is fast to load pages but it is extremely slow working withing the browser. If I had a large page open on a tab switching to it could take a few seconds. Try loading up a few pages with a lot of large images and then switch between tabs. It’s instantaneous in Firefox but it’s long enough delay to make me wonder if Chrome has locked up. Not a good sign.
Sorry, I was bad with my phrasing. I was referring to customizing what appears on the default page that they provide and you can’t avoid when you spin off a new tab. I had located how to change the home page at that point by digging through menus until I found the option.
Been trying it now. Like the fact that – like all decent web browsers – they cribbed ideas from Opera. If you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
Good points: [ul]
[li]It’s fast.[/li][li]Has Opera’s “Paste and Go”[/li][li]Its default page is based upon Opera’s “Speed Dial.”[/li][li]Like Opera, you can use the address bar to do searches and specify the search engine, though Opera’s default is a single letter, not the website name.[/li][li]Like Firefox, it has a spell check for web forms.[/li][li]It offers a google search if you hit a dead link.[/li][li]Find in page doesn’t use a popup.[/li][/ul]
[ul]
[li]No add-ins. [/li][li]No custimizations.[/li][li]Cookie handling is all or nothing.[/li][li]Straight Dope scripts don’t all work correctly.[/li][/ul]
I’m mixed about it. It’s very fast and lean. Still, I won’t be switching from Firefox quite yet. Why?
- Awkward bookmark organization
- No plugins, and especially no Adblock.
- Installs in a non-standard location rather than giving you the option of putting it in the Program Files folder.
That second list of mine were problems.
I like the integrated search/URL blank. Saves space. If you want to force a search just prefix a ?, like “? straightdope.com”
In Vista, seems to handle in-browser PDFs better than Firefox.
I’m using it right now and so far I like it. Can’t complain but it did take me a while to figure out how to set my homepage and handle the bookmarks. Now that I’ve got that set-up I’m okay, but I feel like it’s trying to be a bit too minimalist.
You can do that in Firefox too: just go to the bookmark manager and create a bookmark with an address like “%s - Google Search” (the %s represents a string), and a keyword “?”.
That is good news, I eventually gave up completely on doing that and just downloaded any PDFs before reading them.