Xiaoniu 小妞

I was quite excited to hear that Google finally came out with a web browser and it wasn’t just a new face on an existing browser (like Flock and the later versions of Netscape). I won’t go into details about the features; there are plenty of other posts on the net that do a better job that I would.

So far my experience with Chrome has been positive. About ninety percent of the things I do on a regular basis work just fine. I haven’t noticed any significant changes in the speed of web sites I visit, but I have a slow cable connection and use Firefox 3.0, which is pretty quick.

The developer features are a nice addition. Being able to see how much memory, CPU and network resources are used for each tab is a nice touch. The intelligent address bar makes for a nice mix of history and Google search hits. The new tab initial page showing a list of most often visited sites and recently closed tabs is very handy.

Chrome does have some issues though. For some reason I cannot access any of the Google sites that require me to log in from my work computer. I can click the sign in link, but the browser just dies on the redirect to the Google account login page. I haven’t found any solutions online and I really can’t afford to spend much time at work to diagnose the problem further. I just stick with FF to check my email.

Some sites are work just don’t work. I wrote an Ajax application that includes quite a lot of code and which uses Prototype, but this simply fails with some odd exceptions indicating that the Prototype “update” method doesn’t exist. It’s very weird especially since the application works find in Safari as well as FF 2-3 and IE 6-7. Seeing as Chrome uses WebKit much like Safari it should have worked. Since the app fails horribly I think the V8 JavaScript engine must be at fault. I’ll give it time though and see if any future updates to Chrome resolve this problem.

The one major thing that does affect me most directly is the very poor performance of Flash applications in Chrome. Vimeo and Youtube players just don’t work well in Chrome. They run very slowly, lock up the entire application and are generally less responsive. View the same Flash object in FF 3 and there is no problem. This needs some work.

Although it is not a bug I have a bit pet-peeve when it comes to the phrase “Aw, Snap!”. This is the most unprofessional and idiotic phrase that the developers’ could have chosen for the error screen. Drop the “Aw, Snap!” and the error screen would be perfect. This doesn’t sit well with me, but I don’t think (I hope) that the developer’s remove it before the next release.