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Thoughts on Google Chrome
Sep. 22nd, 2008 12:34 pmIt's interesting to play with, and will make a good alternative-browser when I need something that isn't the Firefox instance I keep running, but it's nowhere near good enough to replace Firefox for me.
There are a lot of missing options - for instance, I can't turn off the spellchecker. What genius came up with that one? I never use a spellchecker. I spell as well as it does, and I know more words, and I'm nowhere near the only person like that. In addition, there's no option to set minimum tab sizes, and the tab bar doesn't scroll - so the labels collapse into uselessness and the icons disappear.
The lack of extensions (and extensibility, apparently) bothers me, too. Adblock and Noscript work wonderfully to keep my browsing crap-free, and Better Gmail stops me having to expand the tab with my mail in, but Chrome won't do either of those things yet.
Most importantly for me, Chrome is much less haptic - when I click on something, it doesn't give any obvious response. Combined with the lack of an obvious progress indicator, that generally leaves me unsure for a second or two whether it's actually doing anything. On the same principle, the lack of a proper status bar at the bottom bothers me. It actually collapses the URLs displayed to fit them into a tiny little popup window... total fail.
Sure, UI should be transparent and intuitive. But till we get DWIMD machines, I need to see things like that. I don't doubt that reskinning it will deal with most of the issues, but right now all I can say about Chrome is 'interesting idea, lots of potential, see you in a few months'.
There are a lot of missing options - for instance, I can't turn off the spellchecker. What genius came up with that one? I never use a spellchecker. I spell as well as it does, and I know more words, and I'm nowhere near the only person like that. In addition, there's no option to set minimum tab sizes, and the tab bar doesn't scroll - so the labels collapse into uselessness and the icons disappear.
The lack of extensions (and extensibility, apparently) bothers me, too. Adblock and Noscript work wonderfully to keep my browsing crap-free, and Better Gmail stops me having to expand the tab with my mail in, but Chrome won't do either of those things yet.
Most importantly for me, Chrome is much less haptic - when I click on something, it doesn't give any obvious response. Combined with the lack of an obvious progress indicator, that generally leaves me unsure for a second or two whether it's actually doing anything. On the same principle, the lack of a proper status bar at the bottom bothers me. It actually collapses the URLs displayed to fit them into a tiny little popup window... total fail.
Sure, UI should be transparent and intuitive. But till we get DWIMD machines, I need to see things like that. I don't doubt that reskinning it will deal with most of the issues, but right now all I can say about Chrome is 'interesting idea, lots of potential, see you in a few months'.
