Wed
Sep
3
My Google Chrome Review/ First impressions
Bad:
- Windows only
- Windows only
- Windows only
- Slow b/c I have to run it under VMWare
- UGLY non-standard UI
- how can I change that blue top and borders? blue is shit
- how can I change those vista-wannabe minimize/maximize/close buttons? (my virtual windows machine is a win XP with classic theme, not blue/green shitty/childish xp)
- No ad blocking = slow page rendering
- Automatically send statistics is the default
- ugly and big icons
- no indication that a website has RSS whatsoever
- no firefox addons support
- the “such tab has become unresponsive” popup is intrusive, will show up while you are reading other unrelated tab.
- the time to consider something as “unresponsive” could be longer
- to keep asking if I want to wait for the page to “become responsive” again and again is annoying, of course I want to wait!
- the minimum tab width to display a favicon could be smaller (it is around 33px today)
- having the space of a single tab to display the page title is stupid
- I would rather have a title bar since they are already spending real state with that ugly, blue, useless shitty top-background
- twitter looks weird, with that ugly-gray resize handler in the corner of the text input
- page resize is suboptimal
- no about:config for power users
- on the empty tab page, clicking on the google chrome beta logo doesn’t take you to the google chrome beta webpage
- pages with embbedded flash sucks (at least under VMWare, don’t know about on native windows)
- font rendering on Gmail is bad (but maybe that’s windows fault)
- requires visual studio 2005(full) to compile
Good:
- Preserve lot’s of firefox shortcuts
- unlike Camino, middle-click do close tabs, which is great!
- about:memory = cool
- about:internets = awesome
- Bug report form already takes a screenshot for you
- You can disable the “automatically send statistics”
- You don’t have to agree with the EULA to test it ;)
- Awesome Comic Book!
- The tab character for the frozen tab messages and tab crashes is cool, reminds me of the Finder face, love the pixelated art on that
- the source is publicly available
- the issue tracker is publicly available
- although no firebug, the dom inspector is not that bad
- the irc chatrooms of the chromium project are pretty active
In summary, this is a true beta software, like in the good old days when this tag meant something. It is not ready for prime time (specially if you don’t use windows) and there is still lots of work ahead until it comes near the maturity of Firefox.
Still, it is nice to have a new take on web browsers, and more important: another open source option.
Kudos to the Google Engineers involved! :)
