Today Google Chrome crashed for the first time, and with it, it took away 15 tabs. The really frustrating thing is that it did not care to restore my session :(
I am wondering where the process isolation for each tab is. But then, it's a beta. Can't complain much...
Hey! Why gmail is still in beta? Does it mean that one day I will find all my emails gone, and I cant complain because its a beta? That will be too frustrating. I have been using gmail for almost 4 years now and I am totally dependent on it...
Someone please explain me this.
After Google launched the beta of its browser Chrome, I started exploring it. I was in love with it within minutes. Gmail was opening faster than Outlook, and so were other site. However, by the evening, I started disliking it as well. Its become a kind of love-hate relationship.
Here I am trying to put rationally why I love it and why I hate it.
Why I am in love with Chrome
Its Fast
The first thing, it is blazingly fast. The difference is visible. Working with JavaScript intensive sites like Gmail is especially a great experience. As I mentioned earlier, the time to open emails and going back to inbox seems actually faster than Outlook. (I do not want to talk about Lotus Notes, that I HAVE to use at work. Anyone who has worked with it, know how painfully resource hungry Lotus Notes is.)
Other sites open fast too. Moreover, the difference is visible. You do not need a specialized test to see it. If you think a proper test is needed, see this page, which has run a early performance test and is wayyyyyy better than IE7 and much better than any competition.
Dragging dropping tabs
Dragging out a tab to form a new window, and then draggin it back to the orginal window is so much fun. I don't know if I will ever use this feature. But its definitely good :-)
Keyboard shortcuts
Chrome has some interesting Keyboard Shortcuts. Below is few of my favorite. The one I like most is CTRL + K. It puts a ? in the address bar and then you just start type what you want to search using your default search engine.
You can get a full list here.
- Ctrl+N — Open a new window
- Ctrl+Shift+N — Open a new window in incognito mode
- Ctrl+T — Open a new tab
- Ctrl+Shift+T — Reopen the last tab you’‘ve closed. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you’‘ve closed.
- Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 — Switch to the tab at the specified position number. The number you press represents a position on the tab strip.
- Ctrl+9 — Switch to the last tab
- Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PgDown — Switch to the next tab
- Ctrl+Shift+Tab orCtrl+PgUp — Switch to the previous tab
- Alt+Home — Open your homepage
- Type a web address, then pressAlt+Enter — Open your web address in a new tab
- Shift+Escape — View the Task manager
- Ctrl+G or F3 — Find next match for your input in the find-in-page box
- Ctrl+Shift+G or Shift+F3 — Find previous match for your input in the find-in-page box
- Ctrl+U — View source
Task Manager
I have a bad (?) habit of keeping 20-30 tabs open at once in FireFox. (I cant think of doing this in IE for the obvious reasons.) It does happen sometimes that because of one bad performing page, my whole session is gone. The Session Restore works most of times, but sometimes it does not.
With Chrome, you have process isolation for each tab. Therefore, if one tab dies, only that tab dies. The other tabs are safe. Really a welcoming feature!
Another useful thing that comes with it, is the Task Manager. Chrome has its own task manager so you can see how each tab and each plug-in is working. Cool!
Bookmarklets
Bookmarklets is one interesting thing, that you should give it a try. These small JavaScript, saved as favorites, do things like changing page color, resizing window to a specified size, searching the selected word in dictionary, and may other interesting things.
Something off topic, the web application I work on has a page with lots of question, where you have to answer No to all the question before you can proceed further. It would of use practically, but during the development, I just need to say No to all. I wrote a simple script to answer No to all these question and saved it as a bookmarklet. Works great for my whole team.
Coming back to the point, these Bookmarklets are IE specific, and do not work in FireFox. However, they do work in Chrome. Means one thing to mean, Chrome has better support for the Javascript.
Why I hate Chrome
Organizing Bookmarks
The fist bad thing is no easy way to organize bookmarks. It imported my FireFox and IE bookmarks very easily, but it put all FireFox bookmarks in one ugly folder. The only way to organize is to drag and drop.
No RSS Feeds
It has no support for RSS feeds. Firefox and even IE handle RSS feeds. When RSS feeds are becoming so popular, I do not believe how Google could ignore handling RSS feeds. If you click on RSS link, all you will see the content XML, without formatting, filling your screen. Ugly!
As expected after experiencing the RSS torture, XML files do not open. IE and FireFox handle them so well.
Bad RAM management
If you leave Chrome open for while, go to some other application, and come back, the tabs have been erased from the RAM. The result is that when you go to a tab, you see a blank screen and then the content starts to appear. This happens when my Laptop has 2 GB of RAM.
Missing Keyboard Shortcuts
There is no keyboard shortcut to append .org or .net. Opera and FireFox have it since long.
I am sure that there will be more things showing themselves as I continue using it. Until then, I am going back to use it. Post in the comments what you think.
There are instances the page uses frames, and you want to view the page source. If you do View > Source, it will not show you the source of the page that you want to view, but only the container page. You could right click and say view source, but then there are certain sites which have disabled right click using javascript. What would you do then?
Solution: Use Maxthon browser.
In the bottom right of the browser, you will see a button that says "Force Open Links in New Tabs".
Before clicking a link, that will opens the page in the frame, click this button. Now the pages will open in a new tab. (You can turn it off later if it is irritating). You will have the page opened in a new tab without frames. Now you can always use the View > Source menu option.
Simple but useful tip I would say.