I held off on trying Chrome for a while because I know things tend to change rapidly after being released. I finally had occasion to really use it (in more than a testing capacity) and was pretty quickly in love. But as the weeks went on, I find myself increasingly frustrated with some of the design choices made that I really just don’t understand. Ultimately, I’ve decided that Chrome is just not right for me.

Stability

Chrome is fast and stable most of the time.  But as a web developer, I work with a lot of flaky websites with flaky markup and flaky JavaScript.  And in about a month of using Chrome as my primary browser, I’ve encountered a handful of cases where a tab would lock up for an inordinate amount of time, often requiring me to just kill it.

It’s very likely, almost guaranteed, that bad JavaScript was at fault.  It’s also possible that I just happened to find some Chrome weaknesses, and of course every browser has their own.  But at the end of the day I am looking for a browser I can use, not debug, and I’m going to use the one that performs most stably without hiding problems that need fixing.

Non-standard ports

Ugh.  This again.  Firefox seems to think that ports 80 and 443 are the only ports the Internet runs on, but at least they have the common decency to let me disable this.  Chrome doesn’t and this heavy-handed approach to security is just bad.  Bad bad bad.

I understand that most people will only need ports 80 and 443.  I understand that most people need security settled for them, and don’t want to know about it under the hood.  I understand that security almost always comes at the cost of convenience.  But at the end of the day, I want a web browser, not a ports 80 and 443 browser.

The only way to explicitly allow other ports is with command line switches!  For such a modern browser made by such a  modern company, I’m baffled as to why they would use such an archaic means of enabling a feature that – let’s face it – a lot of us are going to want.  We may be a minority, but we’re a big one.

Case-sensitive search

When I’m searching a page for a certain string, I usually want case sensitivity.  Again, as a programmer, I’m often interested in finding instances of “Do”, but not every instance of “do” as well.  The lack of case sensitivity makes the page search feature absolutely useless in many situations, leaving me instead with the only option of scouring through the page by hand looking for what I’m after.

If I understand any good reason why this feature was omitted, I might be more forgiving.  But I don’t see any reason for a technical limitation, and the thread in the issue tracker doesn’t shed much light, either.  The final note on it states that

URL / History / Search / LOOK HOW MANY THINGS FIT INSIDE THIS BAR Bar

I love the Firefox “Awesome Bar”.  It’s awesome.  I don’t love the Chrome URL bar.  It tries too hard to be everything and in my experience, usually fails.  Whereas Firefox’s URL bar gets me to pages I frequent with one or two keystrokes, with Chrome I usually find myself trying to work with it, eventually giving up, and just digging through my history or searching for what I was after the hard way.

If I have a local machine named “fudd” and I type “fudd” into Chrome’s URL bar, I get search results about “fudd”.  If I really want to visit “fudd”, I have to either include the “http://”, or create a wonky default search engine to trick it into constructing the URL I asked for.

Okay, okay, you can point out that an actual URL needs to include the “http://”, and this is a PEBKAC situation.  But the fact is that every web browser I’ve ever used implies the “http://” if one isn’t typed, and maybe I just fear change, but I kinda liked it that way.  It makes sense.  You could also point the finger at me for calling it the “URL bar” when it’s apparently called the “omni box”, but that’s where the URL goes so that is the URL bar.

I see the value in combining the URL bar with the search bar, but I see the value in not doing that, too.  Simply put, the previous link is a perfectly viable hack that I shouldn’t have to do to fake-disable a feature that I don’t want.  If the options let me control just how omni my omni box was, I would be satisfied, but they don’t without the aforementioned hack.

Until next time…

I gave it the old college try.  Chrome is an awesome browser and is definitely on my list to try again in several months when they’ve hopefully broadened their target audience a bit.  It’s fast, it’s as modern as it gets in terms of supporting new technologies, and its integrated developer toolbar has been great.  I really wanted this to be my new browser.

But it seems to me that either they’re making a browser for the common user — and only the common user — or they still have a bunch of refining to do.  As someone who does a lot of atypical but perfectly valid stuff with my browser, stuff that I imagine a lot of other programmers are doing as well, it doesn’t meet my needs.  It almost does.  I wish it did.  But alas…