There was an announcement yesterday about Google's new browser called Chrome. I went through three different emotions upon hearing about this new browser.
- I felt a quick kid like excitement. I was rushing to download it and try it out.
- Then I felt a feeling of worry when I thought that I now had yet another browser to test all my websites against. So at that point I went to the Chrome site and started to read the little comic they have to explain their new browser. As I read I found that there was a lot of good sound things about Google's new browser.
- Lastly my feeling was amusement and curiosity as I started to realize just how good the browser was. Here are some of the things I like about Chrome.
Things I like
- I was happy to see that it passed all the CSS3 tests on the CSS3.info site. This is encouraging to me and it will be GREAT to test CSS3 stuff and know I have a playground that supports all of CSS3 and not just a little bit of it.
- I was happy that each tab is it's own process. That way when a site goes mad and freezes, I don't loose what I was doing on another tab.
- It is very lite looking but pretty browser. (ya I know I am a professional and that shouldn't matter. But it does.)
- The search bar is the address bar. I think that is how browsers should have all been made.
- Most visited sites page. Kind of cool, but I want to see it in action a couple months from now.
- Load times are pretty darned fast.
Things I don't like
- When I was using Chrome on my Vista PC disc bullets were displayed with white corners which made the bullets look like stars at certain sizes.
- I don't like what it did to my favorites. It imported my favorites from IE7 and then tried to logically sort them. I can't find anything anymore. I wish I hadn't imported them. My advice is do NOT import favorites.
- The "Inspect Element" is a nice try but it isn't as good as IE8's Developer Toolbar or Firefox's Firebug extension. I can't get to a mode where I can hover over the page and click an element I want to inspect. I can go through the markup and eventually find my element by watching what lights up. But it just isn't as good as I would like.
Well I think that is it for now. I am going to use this browser a LOT in the next couple weeks to test things out. I know I will be able to soon ad much more to both of the above lists. I can't wait to find out what cool tools Google has added to the browser. I also can't wait to see if I can take some things off my "Things I don't like" list when I get to know the browser a bit more.
Well thanks Google for giving me more work to do. The good thing is that I really like my work.
~Mike