Wednesday 28 January 2009

Google Chrome

When it first appeared I hated it because I couldn't find any easy way of managing the bookmarks. After a month or two, someone pointed me to the bookmarks manager, which was somewhere I'm almost sure I'd originally looked in vain. I gather Chrome quietly updates itself  all the time. That's wonderful while it works, but I hope they never make a bad mistake.

I like the way it handles tags, and shows frequently visited sites on the home page, but I still have some reservations. When I bookmark a site, I have to move the mouse very cautiously to avoid the bookmark going in the wrong place, and there's no indication that it has gone anywhere even when it has. There are a few sites that don't look their best with Chrome - over wide margins sometimes obscure material I want to read, and on one site every time I move to another page I have to press the maximise button before I can read it.

Still, overall I'm growing quite fond of Chrome and it is now my default browser. 

2 comments :

Ged said...

It's my default browser now too, though I occasionally fire up Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox still.

I like the combination of speed, low resource usage, and standards compliance. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a reasonable compromise.

I tend to have google reader open in one window, and I cruise through the news feeds opening a new tab whenever I see an interesting headline. The tabs open in the background and I don't start to read them until I've gone through ten or twenty headlines. Add to this pages that I've gone to directly, and you can see that a single browser window full of tabs soon gets cluttered and unusable. So I greatly profit by Chrome's ability to spawn a new window by dragging a tab away from the current window: this enables me to organise the twenty or thirty open tabs thematically, into three or four windows, and then read through them in some semblance of order.

Richard said...

Chrome's ability to spawn a new window by dragging a tab away from the current window

I didn't know about that; I must experiment :-)