Why I live inside my chrome browser

And I have for several months now, and happily, I might add.

So, let’s talk a little bit about my portal to happiness, my stairway to heaven, although, I am sorry, I forgot – no stairway. Chrome from Google. Available on all big operating systems, I’ve been using it for hundreds of hours now on ubuntu. You simply have to hit the official site, and get the appropiate software package, which the site automatically chooses and offers to you. As a slightly confusing sidenote, you have to pay attention to the two versions that are available in the wild: The one we are talking about here, and the other one without the branding, the name and logo, called chromium, which runs under the BSD license, but for me just created many problems unknown to me before, like freezing the screen and refusing to play video on the web.

With Chrome proper however, you get a browser that is fast. Really fast. That takes up only half of standard Firefox’ primary memory consumption, which makes it even faster. And lighter. That ist stable, unlike anything I’ve seen before, and that’s saying a lot seeing I use ubuntu. And apparently, very secure. Can’t really talk about that, since I am still waiting for a proper virus under the ‘Nux family, and all I ever got offered online was some stale “download this *.exe and be happy instantly” – come on guys, you should be able to see the IP, ISP, browser and of course, operating system of most of your forced-upon visitors – and I didn’t even modify the user-agent.

So, let’s get to the shortcomings, as there still are a few, as of me running version 5.0.375.70.

First off, sometimes chrome hides, or “blacks out” the tabs. You have to point over them quickly in order to be able to see your tabs again. No biggie. But peculiar. Next, when trying to automatically add a RSS-feed to Google Reader, which usually takes like, one click, chrome just displays the text of the last few entries of that particular feed, but not the usual little site letting you choose between “iGoogle” and “Reader”. Minor inconvenience this. Moving on, certain sites display a big red warning saying that the site’s security certificate has run out or isn’t valid. Like this -

And you could be unlucky and have this without the left button letting you proceed all the same, effectively shutting you out without any real security reason. This problem usually has its reason in out-of-sync time settings, and it seems to be popping up again over time passing. So, no Gears of War stats for this browser, sometimes.

The only real big issue is, of all things, GMail. Google Mail under chrome doesn’t let you put in the recipient’s email address, you have to always type the first few letters of the email address, and hope that GMail does its autocomplete. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the attachments: 75% of times you like to attach something, and click the “attach” button, the button vanishes, and that’s it. So, no attachments for this baby. Gotta hit pidgin and try to move the stuff over there.

So there you go, my pros and cons of Google’s magical chrome browser. Besides the mentioned minor annoyances, I truly never have looked back. Also, it has Feedsquares.

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On the shoulders of giants -

Get the browser for free here – http://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB&brand=

After some time, you’ll need these shortcuts – http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95743

And for a little insight of how chrome’s separate tabs work, look at the official chrome comic book -http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/