(no subject)
Ok, so now I've had a chance to play with Chrome a little more, I can voice my opinions.
So, overall opinion - I love it. I don't like the fact that they claim all the innovation is their own, but ignoring that as a separate issue, the technical product is a dream to use - fast, sexy transitions; quick rendering (which ultimately is the most important feature of a browser); easy to use. In fact, if the KDE developers used this as the base for Konqueror, and kept all the file-system integration that makes Konqueror my browser of choice on Linux, it would make my day.
They need to allow skinning (or at least colour choice) and also allow scaling of icons and fonts. Then it would really win me.
I'm going to use it for the foreseeable future, as this is just a first review of ten minutes. I haven't tried any plug-ins yet (though I don't think there are any), that may break things for me. Who knows!
EDIT: Ok, found the big killer. No ad-blocking to the extent that Opera had. That's a big let-down. I can imagine that'll be one of the first plug-ins built, but I can't use it till then. In fact, this is what I hate about FireFox - there are some fundamental things that are so simple the browser should integrate them directly, such as content blocking (not just ads), or auto-refresh. The FireFox route of 'here's the absolute basics, fuck you and do it yourself if you want anything more' is utterly terrible.
- It's quick. Very quick. Surprisingly, noticeably quicker over Opera - something I thought would never happen.
- They've tried to make things more simple - and they've succeeded - but they've also made everything bigger, with no control over sizes - the tabs are too big for what the need to be, and the font and icon sizes on the address bar is far too large. The end result is that with the exact same settings in Opera (as I only ever had tab bar and address bar underneath, in any browser I use that I can do that with), it uses just the same amount of real-estate.
- Linked to the previous item, the size of the address bar defeats their idea of seeing through the browser to the content - the font is so large that it distracts the eye.
- Again, going against their 'lack of distractions' philosophy, the 'new tab' page is nothing but a distraction. There are people out there who want a blank page for a reason, that reason being they know damn well how to navigate the intertubes. (However, I've already used it once, so it may be something I come to like, or at least accept.)
- Built in, region specific dictionary wins big time. Colour, not color. This makes me a very happy person.
- Highlighting the current input box is kinda neat, but again there's a sodding flashy cursor for that
- My god, resizeable multi-line text boxes. That is very neat. I approve heartily of that. (Stretch the bottom right hand of a multi-line text box.)
- I've not had much chance to try the forking they go on about, as you kinda need to find a broken page to test it on. (That might be something they could do - make a site that just send JS into an infinite loop of doing nothing, simply to show off the whole concept.)
- Oddly, MobileMe works fine - something so fickle with JS that it didn't even support IE to begin with - just FireFox and Safari. Google must have been working with Apple to make sure it works, and Apple must have added Chrome to their list of supported browsers. (Amusingly enough, Google isn't in the dictionary!)
- No smooth scrolling. It breaks the smooth transition of the rest of the interface, having the page judder around all the time as you scroll. That's something I'll miss from Opera.
So, overall opinion - I love it. I don't like the fact that they claim all the innovation is their own, but ignoring that as a separate issue, the technical product is a dream to use - fast, sexy transitions; quick rendering (which ultimately is the most important feature of a browser); easy to use. In fact, if the KDE developers used this as the base for Konqueror, and kept all the file-system integration that makes Konqueror my browser of choice on Linux, it would make my day.
They need to allow skinning (or at least colour choice) and also allow scaling of icons and fonts. Then it would really win me.
I'm going to use it for the foreseeable future, as this is just a first review of ten minutes. I haven't tried any plug-ins yet (though I don't think there are any), that may break things for me. Who knows!
EDIT: Ok, found the big killer. No ad-blocking to the extent that Opera had. That's a big let-down. I can imagine that'll be one of the first plug-ins built, but I can't use it till then. In fact, this is what I hate about FireFox - there are some fundamental things that are so simple the browser should integrate them directly, such as content blocking (not just ads), or auto-refresh. The FireFox route of 'here's the absolute basics, fuck you and do it yourself if you want anything more' is utterly terrible.