Trying to like Chrome

Now that the Google Chrome browser is official for Linux and Mac, I've been trying to use it and like it. It's hard though. I keep looking for the tabs below the address bar, but Chrome decided to put them up higher. It's not a huge deal, but it's causes some friction. The other problem I noticed right away is when you get a bunch of tabs open, the tabs get really small, and the x button to close a tab is almost a full 1/4 of the entire tab. It's easy to click the x and close a tab when you don't mean to. In firefox this happens too, and the remedy is to click History->Recently Closed Tabs and get your tab back. No such option in Chrome. There is a list of recently closed pages, but if you click one of then, it doesn't open a new tab, it just switches the tab that you are on to the page in the history. Grr.

Comments

Nolan said…
I actually really like the higher tabs feature. I thought it was a great use of the title bar, which is really just wasted window space. I use a netbook at home and every pixel counts! So anything to give me a little more browsing room is a welcome feature!
June 1, 2010 at 9:55 AM
Vernon Mauery said…
I have been using Chrome for many moons now. I like that it doesn't crash. I kept having FF crash on me. Like when I opened gmail, for instance. Completely unacceptable to let your plugins crash the whole browser. With a couple of extensions, I have found Chrome to be quite usable. I agree on the close tab X. I never use them, I always middle click on the tab to close, so I wish there were a way to get rid of the X altogether. I had an extension in FF that did just that. If you accidentally click it, you can retrieve your closed tab with shift-ctrl-t. The biggest problem I have with it is that it uses a lot of memory. They claim that it doesn't use very much, but when I have twenty tabs open and I close the whole browser, my memory usage drops significantly. But still, with FF, I found that it would slowly eat more and more memory if I left it open, so I would have to periodically kill it and restart.
June 1, 2010 at 10:15 AM
Bryan said…
Thanks for the encouragement guys. You list good reasons to like Chrome. I have gotten really tired of firefox plugins crashing the whole browser, and chrome does feel snappier.

Another downside, I just noticed that there's no good replacement for the firefox plugin, It's All Text. I *love* that plugin and the only chrome equivalents require you to run some server that intermediates between chrome and your editor. It just doesn't work as well.
June 1, 2010 at 1:00 PM
Edwin said…
I've used chrome now on Windows, Mac and just recently on Linux (there was some code reviewing software that errored on the Linux version of Firefox but worked great in Chrome). I think that it works better or the same as every other browser I've tried. I've been happy with the "Edit with Emacs" extension (only tried it on Mac), but I may not know the joy of "It's all Text".

Like any good emacs user, I try to avoid the mouse whenever possible and I find that the x on the tab is not a problem for me. Learn the key bindings!
June 1, 2010 at 3:00 PM
piyo said…
I really like Chrome. Now with that out of the way, I notice that I hit the Control Shift T too much. There's an add-on for viewing recently closed tabs called "Recent History" and it seems to open a new tab if you click the middle mouse button. I also recently figured out how to add my own keyword searches programmatically, by editing the sqlite3 database "Web Data". Tabs on top made me experiment with placing my Windows task bar up top, which doesn't feel so bad (it's like Ubuntu?). Also the ad-block is really just an ad-hider, so keep your Privoxy running. To be mouseless is to use Vimium and set the keybindings to be more w3m-like. Finally when I save a web page the whole browser hangs (all windows). Weird stupid bug.
June 1, 2010 at 3:35 PM
Unknown said…
CTRL+SHIFT+T = Reopen Closed Tab
June 2, 2010 at 12:26 AM
Alex said…
Bryan,

You really should give Edit with Emacs a go. If you already run an emacs --daemon it's really not overly dramatic to also run the edit-server.

Given the chrome architecture the only other option is some sort of binary plugin to spawn the editor which has a number of other problems associated with it.

Patches for both the Chrome and Emacs side are always gratefully received :-)

Alex
June 2, 2010 at 12:31 AM
Private Investigator in Santa Monica said…
I didn't worked at Google chrome too much, I am very addict to use the Firefox all the time & don't think it creates problem for me. both are good & I like to work on them.
June 16, 2010 at 8:31 PM
John Tells All said…
to add to Kevin's comment, right-clicking on the tab area will give you a menu which includes "Reopen Closed Tab". I use this about 1-2 times a day!
June 20, 2010 at 12:20 AM
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