Monday, March 22nd 2010

Giving Chrome a Chance

I have had Google Chrome installed basically since the day it was released. But I have never had a serious go at using it.

The other day I decided to give it a try. So I re-installed it to get a blank new profile and then imported my Firefox bookmarks, history, search engines and passwords.

Here are a few things I noticed:

• Speed. Chrome feels very responsive. Especially I notice that Google Reader runs extremely smoothly. No lag at all when I hit n to jump to the next news item.
• Design. I have always liked the Chrome design and layout, with the tabs right at the top, maximizing space for web pages.
• Imported passwords? Chrome claimed to import my passwords from Firefox but they are nowhere to be found. Perhaps because I use a master password in Firefox, and hence the password data is encrypted.
• Searching. Using Chrome’s location bar (omnibox) to search using the installed search engines is not as simple and intuitive as using Firefox’s search box. The idea is that I should be able to type goo and hit tab to select the Google search engine. But if Chrome has ranked something else higher than google.com – in my case Google Reader – tab won’t select the search engine. This brings me on to my next point.
• Tab. The tab button doesn’t move the cursor from the location bar to the list of matching web pages. Instead it jumps to content in the current web page. Of course, I’m meant to press the down arrow to get to the list, but Firefox lets me use Tab which is much easier to reach while typing.
• Location bar matches. Just like Dave Dash noticed, Google Chrome isn’t at all as good as Firefox when it comes to finding what I want in the location bar. The last two days I have typed recent many times to get to Recent forum activity at Dpreview.com. It still brings up a Google search for recent as the top choice and Flickr’s recent activity page as the second choice – a page I haven’t visited even once using Chrome. Chrome’s location bar needs to get better at reading my mind.
• In-page searching. There is no way of making Chrome search a web page as soon as I start typing in text. This is one of my favourite features of Firefox.

Those things were enough to make me want to go back to Firefox. Two days in Chrome is still longer than I’ve ever managed before 😉

Posted at 10:16. Tags: Google Chrome, review. Categories: browsers, Mozilla Firefox. Both comments and trackbacks are closed.

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