More on Chrome

Well, now that a few days have gone and while the hype is still on, I'll share some rants on my Chrome experience.

First of all, I need to admit that Google's browser has become my default browser for RSS reading (and yes, actually with Google Reader). You don't really notice all the available space in a big screen (17+ inches), but when you are in a small screen'd laptop, it becomes evident. And the fact is, that in my current screen resolution (which is not that small either, only the height: 1280 x 800 px) the folders I have just exactly fit into a maximized Chrome's window.

But besides that, it still has a long way to go before it replaces Firefox in my daily needs. One of my main complains is that, when you search for a keyword in Chrome, (control or command + F) you are not taken immediately to that keyword, after you remove focus from the search (pressing escape). In Firefox, when I perform an inline search (or whatever that is called) , after I press escape in the keyboard, focus is automatically passed to the current keyword result, and if its a link, I just have to press enter to follow that link, (or control/command + enter to open it in a new tab). I do love keyboard shortcuts, they can really make a difference.

In other complaints: I just discovered that Chrome does not play nice with a CSS layout I designed a few weeks ago (Fiery Cosmic beta theme, used on LozBlog). This is really beginning to become a bigger issue: if a lot of people start using Chrome (which I wouldn't dare to assure now, a few weeks more, past the hype and we'll see), and when IE8 comes out, how many important browsers we'll be needing to hack up for the sake of our beloved standard compliant projects?

About the drag-out-tab-to-new-window, I think it's cool, but (always a but)... I'm usually dragging and dropping all kinds of things into new tabs (or into address bar, or search bar) in Firefox. Just dragging an image and releasing it on the tab bar will open it in a new window. I'm also used to do this with links, or selected text. And I'm also used to do this with tabs, between windows and even between browsers (right now I only remember it working between Firefox and Flock), I would drag a tab, move the cursor to the windows task bar (still dragging the tab), place the cursor on top of the desired window name (in the windows task bar) for a few seconds, switch focus to this other window (which would be obviously a browser), and release the tab into the tab bar. It also works if you go alt/command + tab while holding the dragged tab, but I usually do this dragging procedure when I'm holding a beer with the left hand. All this crazy thing is not currently supported by Chrome.

And that lack of functionality thing with the middle mouse click is really annoying.

A not really important rant: in Windows, sometimes I use to switch windows by clicking on the title bar of an application, which if maximized, should be at the top of the screen, so I move the pointer all the way up (no need to loose time with precision pointing here) and click (also: the desired window should be on top of other maximized windows for this to work). But in Chrome, which lacks said bar, most times I end up switching to another tab.

I realize that most of this issues are not used by everybody, but hey, nowadays PC's, OS's and gadgets are all about personal user customization, right? Anyway, maybe you'll find these rants useless but then again, maybe you just learned something new.