Comments on: a week with Chrome

By: darkermatter

darkermatter — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:37:24 +0000

Re: Comments by Basil Safwat…

Surely, the close buttons would work just as well on the left as long as one doesn’t mouse out of the tab bar.

The tabs still have to slide in to fill the same gap/size!

By: outrider

outrider — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 07:56:09 +0000

Something I don’t like: no ‘Mail this page’ or ‘mail link to this page’, as in Safari. And I’m also missing FF’s fun stuff. Chrome is kind of like
Al Gore dancing at the Clinton inaugural ball.

By: Andrew Choi

Andrew Choi — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:58:10 +0000

the thing i couldn’t stand about safari, though it grew on me over time, was the lack of ‘open last closed tab’ which i use 100 times a day

By: notemily

notemily — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:46:58 +0000

The feature I most miss (from Firefox) is command-shift-T for “open most recently closed tab.” I’m always closing tabs and then realizing I wasn’t done with that tab. Chrome keeps excellent and easy-to-use history, so I don’t miss it as much as I did in Safari, but it’s still a feature I would love to see.

By: mindtangle » Blog Archive » Weekly Digest for January 14th

mindtangle » Blog Archive » Weekly Digest for January 14th — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:02:11 +0000

[...] A Week With Chrome for Mac. Yup, me [...]

By: Fahrenheit533

Fahrenheit533 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:29:36 +0000

My daughter complained that her MBP was running very slow. She downloaded the Beta of Chrome. Checking the Activity Monitor I found a background Chrome helper app was using 1.29 Gb of her 2GB. And Chrome wasn’t even running!

By: Grover

Grover — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:06:34 +0000

Ah, never mind. It doesn’t work with sub-folders, making it useless for me. Back to Safari.

By: Grover

Grover — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:46:19 +0000

God bless you for finding the Open All Bookmarks option. I too use the Open in Tabs option a hundred times a day and it’s lack was the primary reason I can’t use Chrome.

By: tim

tim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:36:18 +0000

It’s certainly true that the thin titlebar makes it much slower to grab for moving. A more severe but less frequent problem is that about 1/10 of the time, when you drag a tab (intentionally or not), the tab floats a couple inches to the side of where your mouse pointer is. Sometimes I’m so close to the edge of the screen already, it’s physically impossible for me to put it back right away.

You know, I just realized when writing this that the most common thing I want to do when dragging a tab in Chrome is “cancel this drag”. That’s not exactly glowing praise for its tab implementation.

And unlike most other drag-n-drops (including Firefox, and Safari but only for out-of-window drags), you can’t just hit Escape to cancel. You actually have to figure out where it was and drag it back. Frustrating!

By: jhz

jhz — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:34:39 +0000

My perspective is a bit different.
I’m a Firefox user (OS X 10.5), and Safari lacks on the features side for me.
Chrome, so much faster than FF, lacked extensions until recently (I’ve been using now and then the dev version for almost one year now).
Now that Chrome obtains crucial features (via extensions) like session manager, switching from FF ti Chrome became a real possibility.
And then I tried FF 3.6 RC which feels so much faster than 3.5…
I suppose I will continue to use Chrome and Safari from times to times, but it seems FF will remain my main browser for the time being.

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:52:57 +0000

> The nutshell version of Safwat’s argument is that putting the tab
> closure icon on the right allows users to quickly close them with
> mouse-clicks with minimal mouse movements regardless of if they
> are closing from left to right or right to left.

This has more to do with Chrome’s delayed resizing of tabs. Having the tab close buttons on the left would still work well on Chrome as long as it does the delayed resizing.

Also as Fabio Romeo notes, there’s a striking lack of customization options for the Mac version of Chrome. For the Linux version, you can pick to use the default blue theme or the system’s GTK theme. Going further the user can also use the system title bar on top instead of Chrome’s tabs-on-top. That’s a high level of system integration, something we unfortunately didn’t see for the Mac version of Chrome with Google’s insistence to put the close tab button to the left.

By: outrider

outrider — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:12:10 +0000

I love Chrome and will not go back to Safari or FF–too many problems w/both, e.g., sloooow, buffering for I don’t know why, resized windows…in Chrome, when I ‘open new window’ I get a smaller screen with two rows of windows, some with pages all ready to load, like I have Pandora, Bing (I almost said ‘Bling’), and my iGoogle homepage, which I really like; I could reset this as my homepage and start whatever window–or enter a new url–I want. I also like the iGoogle/Gmail interface, a nice unobtrusive mail manager that is so common-sense…and also like the combo browser/search engine….the icon has a turban-like quality….

By: Fabio Romeo

Fabio Romeo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:22:02 +0000

Chrome for Mac is just… wrong. It feels like that guy from school who is trying a little too hard to be your friend, but not quite, and you say what the hell, let’s hang up together for a while, but then you get bored and always go back to your old friends.

I’m with Gruber, close is on the left. And Josh and Pup, I also think that the tabs on top sucks, for the same reasons. Also, there’s no way to customize the toolbar, nor a way to add the zoom, downloads and history buttons, and no services which I use daily. I miss the “look up in dictionary” option in the contextual menu too. Oh, I need an extension to use my custom userstyle.css? Safari allows it without any hacks (since there’s no extensions for it).

With so much needed, and since both are webkit browsers, I thought “why bother?”. So I deleted Chrome. Maybe it will get better, but I’m not holding my breath.

By: Dipika

Dipika — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:39:12 +0000

I agree with Basil Safwat. It feels easier to close tabs from the right side and have the close button of the next tab slide under the cursor.

The animations and UI elements ARE really nice in Chrome! Wish that kind of polish could come to Opera (mac). It has some very useful small features that I’m too used to shift

* Cmd-B to copy paste, Shift-X to fast forward to the logical next page in websites
* Turbo mode to help with slow connections
* text and icon pointers for shifting between tabs with Alt-Tab
* Ability to make any search form into a custom search engine
* Full Screen mode

By: A Week With Chrome for Mac «

A Week With Chrome for Mac « — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 07:29:43 +0000

[...] Original source : http://blog.founddrama.net/2010/01/a-week-with-chr…; [...]

By: tim

tim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 06:50:55 +0000

You underestimate the significance of your #3 dislike, “Text fields do not (always) play by the rules”.

Try setting your keyboard to Hiragana and typing in a text field: you get Latin characters. Yep, it’s impossible to type Japanese in Mac Chrome!

I hadn’t noticed all of the other ways that text fields in Chrome are weird, but it doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know what you do to make that not work (did they implement their own text fields?), but there it is.

By: Laurent

Laurent — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:35:05 +0000

“The icon. Chrome’s icon blows. It looks like a Pokémon egg.”

Everytime I see it I think of Electric Light Orchestra. Search for “ELO” in Google Images and you’ll see what I mean

By: A Week With Chrome for Mac « Apple News Daily

A Week With Chrome for Mac « Apple News Daily — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:40:20 +0000

[...] A Week With Chrome for Mac [...]

By: Nathan DeGruchy

Nathan DeGruchy — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:59:36 +0000

Ugh. The only thing that bugs me about Chrome for the mac is that it resizes the window when the download bar appears. I HATE IT when it resizes a window. Shrink the viewable area or something.

By: found_drama

found_drama — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:16:13 +0000

A few @replies:

RE: extensions (@MacMacken) – I know quite a few folks that swear by their extensions, but for my money and mileage, they usually just wind up as bloat.

RE: top sites landing “page” (@Mr Skills, @Rod Christiansen) – File this one under “time will tell”, for me. I definitely agree that Safari has a more polished-looking “Top Sites” feature and though I have it set as my “home page” (in both browsers, no less), I spend so little time with it that it didn’t even occur to me to go deep on that aspect of the comparison. Color me intrigued though.

RE: integrated search (@Wil) – This is a great point! Perhaps it just felt so natural that I didn’t even think to comment on it? (Or perhaps I was distracted by waiting for it to turn “ama” into “amazon.com”?)

RE: tabs-on-top nay-sayers (@Josh, @Pup) – I will concede that the narrower title bar results in a narrower target and so there’s more work, more room for erroneous clicks. I feel the need to mull this, but for now I stand by my published assessment.

RE: no Services menu (@David) – I agree that this is obnoxious, and makes it (shall we say) “not a good OS X citizen”. But to that point: (1) I was thrilled when Snow Leopard put Services in the context menu but months later have found that I don’t really use it that much; (2) except for the Dictionary lookups — long live Cmd+Ctrl+D!

Also, absolutely loved this quote @Hamranhansenhansen:

Chrome is my favorite browser that I don’t use.