Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Chrome comments

So now my old XP box has Firefox, Safari, IE 7 and Chrome.

This is good.
  • When you enter "about:memory" in the title bar you get "stats for nerds". The Browser stats compare Firefox 3.01 and Chrome "0.2.149.27".
  • Shift-Esc brings up the task manager, listing evil Plug-Ins like Flash. Sure feels like an OS to me.
  • There are a few options, like putting the home button on the toolbar.
  • When you type a url, the file name is in faded text. Cute.
  • Nice emulation of FF 3's best feature -- the all-in-one status bar. IE copied it too. This is good.
  • I enabled Gears for Google Docs, it created a shortcut of the form:
    "C:\Documents and Settings\jfaughnan\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --app=https://docs.google.com/"
  • You can search History, but it doesn't integrate iGoogle history.
  • Ctrl-B toggles the bookmark bar.
  • The "chrome" is pleasingly minimal. No separate status bar, no menu to speak of, so it really uses the screen well.
  • The address bar also integrates Google search, and it searches all visited web pages.
  • Lunarpages, a web service provider that I've recently replaced with DreamHost, has an invalid security certificate (yeah, they have problems). FF gives me a dire warning, but lets me visit. Chrome just wipes them away -- no error message, the page can't be visited.
  • The "courier" font size on ToodleDo is unusably small with Chrome. It's usable with FF, IE and Safari.
Since the address bar searches all visited web pages, does this mean that if you visit a web page you've been keeping "secret" (obscure URL), that Google is now going to index it?

Rumor says the OS X version is far away - alas.

Update: Chrome search against pages visited is run against an archive stored on the local machine. So those mildly secure since obscure pages are not exposed.

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