Google Chrome for OS X
May 26th, 2010 - 11:00 am
Here’s a short & sweet review of the Gold version of Chrome for OS X.
Pros: Lightning fast page-rendering. I mean, seriously. It’s Hammer Time fast — you can’t touch this.
Cons: If you like Safari, you’ll hate the way Chrome handles tabs and bookmarks.
The jury is still out on whether Chrome’s rendering is fast enough to make up for what to me is a clumsy interface. I always have enough windows and tabs open (usually a dozen windows, each with multiple tabs) that waiting for a page to render is no big deal. But speedy navigation through all those pages is vital.
I use Firefox and Opera… Firefox is the best out there if you want a highly customizable and very powerful browser that does all sorts of other things through plugins. Opera seems just as fast as Chrome to me, and uses less memory (I normally have a good ten to twenty tabs open between the two browsers)… but has issues with some sites.
I’ve never liked Safari, so I couldn’t say whether you’d hate these because of differences on how they handle tabs, although Firefox can be modified so much that it can handle tabs just about any way you want.
My problem with Google Chrome is that I’ve had stability issues with it. Aside from that, I can deal with the differences in the interface and I like the speed.
But crashing irritates me.
Opera is an excellent alternative, but in the same way one might object to Chrome’s interface, I dislike Opera’s interface. I never have seen the need to change elemental keyboard shortcuts such as Alt-D or Control-D (two of my favorites) just because the app designer thought his/her way was “better.”
It’s been a long time since I used Safari, since it’s been a long time since I had regular access to Macs. Is the Safari interface very much different from Firefox?
Why doesn’t anybody care that Chrome sends your entire web browsing history to Google???
In every other browser, where the search box and URL box are separate, searches go to Google (or wherever) but URLs are strictly local. Google combined the search and URL box into a single box so everything is sent to them.
Good god, if someone installed a tracking cookie on your system to capture your browsing history, you would call it malware!!