The Geeks Journey to Chrome’s Home Page
It’s funny how right after Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 8 beta Google comes out with Chome Beta. The browser wars just got a bit more interesting with the search giant finally playing their card. Chrome comes out with a very strong showing and if it can come up with a few much missed features it will surely be a worthy contender.
Install and First Use
What’s shocking at first is the minimalisim of the browser. Who would have thought a web browser requires so little. It has a nice easy installer that seemed to have default options set well and provided additional ones easily.
Initially I just checked slashdot and looked at my personal sites. It was nice… smooth even. No adblock though. Unfortunately the word is no plug-ins right now. Hopefully later I can get rid of these wierd blobs of color that suddenly appeared on the web.
Other thoughts:
- Seems to have an incognito function where browser history isn’t saved? I need to check into how truly incognito this is.
- All major keyboard shortcuts seem to be exactly the same.
- No menu besides two mysterious icons on right.
- Highlights form fields.
- For some reason I have a horizontal scroll bar on my website.
- Seems to play flash automagically. Not sure if it linked up with my existing plugin or built-in.
Later that day
Checked gmail.
Can’t figure out how to get back home, was really digging the most visited home page thing.
One more stab
Visited Gmail, slashdot, and digg off my most recent.
There seems to be intelligent grouping of the tabs!
I read an article on cnet on what they’d like in chrome.. I’d like a menu or a home page option. Maybe those two menus on the far right.
There’s a task manager for google chrome. Right click on the title bar. It’s telling me flash seems built-in. And there’s a button here that actually says “Stats for nerds” Remember this is a multi-threaded application. The task manager shows the PID’s of running tabs and processes. If one page locks up, in theory you can just kill it.
I’m checking out those menus finally.
The create application shortcut looks pretty darn sweet. I’ve been making shorties on my desktop recently.
Text zoom doesn’t scale pictures.
Source code is highlighted, numbered, and linked.
Javascript debugger is just a terminal. I admit I’m not that hip on javascript so I don’t muck around. By any means the Javascript console seems a bit more sophisticated.
EUREKA!.. the first option in the wrench says always show bookmarks! I have a bookmark menu!!!
History looks clean. Love the way it spaces out time.
Now I finally find options. Then finally find the show home page button.
Crap that’s a long way to get back to google. I would expect any other user to just shut down the browser and restart.
Perhaps the home button should be next to the close?
Pros: Everything above
Cons: No adblock. I hadn’t realized how ugly sites are. No plugins.
Take 4
Went incognito.. Windows media player seems to clunk into place just fine. Seems clunky.. need to replace this drive.
Computer running slow Take 5
Just looked, and apparently Chrome runs some sort of auto-update.. umm.. I don’t remember the program asking if it could update in my backyard.
Not sure how I’m gonna take that.
I found that it’s pretty easy to remove. Every geek who uses XP should know the location HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run in the registry. If you don’t then take a look there. That’s where a lot of your software that loads on boot is found. Googleupdater appeared and then magically disappeared when I hit delete.