

Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux - hazzen
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/pedal-to-chrome-metal-our-fastest-beta.html

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rottencupcakes
Probably the single thing that keeps me using Firefox is its address bar. It's
a much nicer experience than Chrome's, with its user-friendly auto complete
mechanisms.

The speed of the browsers is rarely the bottleneck for me anymore. I'll switch
to Chrome for intense javascript experiences, but that's about it. I feel like
chrome needs to start focusing more time on the experience - these speed
improvements aren't paying dividends anymore.

~~~
albertzeyer
What do you mean with the address bar? Chromes bar also has autocompletion. I
even find it simpler to use. In Firefox, I have to press the down-key + enter
to select a suggestion. In Chrome, I just have to press enter.

What do you think is missing otherwise in Chrome?

I think the overall user experience is probably much better compared to
Firefox in nearly all aspects.

~~~
hasanove
While I use Chrome as default, I too miss Firefox autocompletion.

In Firefox, I would just start typing "Hacker News" and HN would popup as a
first suggestion after first letter, probably based on usage frequency.

The only way to get the same result in Chrome, is to start typing
"news.ycombinator.com", which means you have to remember url, not the name.
Chrome, will surely find by "Hacker News" too, but I will need to type in at
least 5-6 characters for that.

~~~
_delirium
That might be why I prefer Chrome's. I usually type URLs, only fall back to
typing titles if I don't remember the URL, and it _really_ annoys me how often
Firefox will take me to the wrong site unless I type a fairly large prefix of
the URL. In Chrome I can just type ne..., while in Firefox I have to go all
the way to news.y... before it'll give me the right completion.

~~~
abstractbill
As far as I can tell, both browsers have basic learning algorithms that are
supposed to predict better over time what site you want (in both Chrome and
Firefox I can now just type 'n' to get to Hacker News).

However, even though I currently use Chrome as my primary browser, I think
Firefox still gets this slightly better - I think it learned more quickly and
accurately for me at least.

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trickjarrett
It certainly feels faster. It also took less than half the time to run the
webkit JS benchmark than my firefox install. 414ms vs 1046ms.

And it also fixed a glitch I was fighting with the Xmarks extension being
unable to sync.

So I'm back to Chrome as my default browser.

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tvon
Things keeping me from using Chrome:

* Lack of built-in RSS support. This one kind of blows my mind.

* Worst progress indicator I've ever seen.

* Can't open external links in new windows, have to open in "tab of whatever my last used browser window was".

* Flash crashes more than it does in Safari/Firefox, but I don't blame Chrome for that.

Not exactly constructive to the conversation I guess, but at least the first
three things have been driving me nuts for a bit.

~~~
ube
My list of things keeping from Chrome is same as yours though I'd also add
lack of google gears support. I don't understand how they have that for
firefox but they don't have it from Chrome. In addition to this Chrome (on the
mac) crashes quite frequently for me.

~~~
tvon
Client-side HTML5 databases have supplanted gears.

~~~
ube
Fair enough - so how do I use google docs when I'm offline?

Alternatively, would you have suggestions on some other service that provides
similar doc capability with html5 database?

~~~
tvon
Good question(s), I was just relaying the decision Google made:

<http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html>

~~~
ube
Thanks...that makes total sense. I need to (sadly) give google gears the boot.

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nanijoe
I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but lately Google Chrome just
freezes up most times I open a page that has flash. I'm using it on a Mac

~~~
coyul
If you haven't quit the browser in awhile, this can happen. The good news is
that in Chrome you can kill just the flash plugin without losing the rest of
your browsing session (I usually do this by opening the Activity monitor and
killing it from there; usually at that point you can see that the Flash plugin
has gone completely nuts eating memory...)

Once the Flash plugin is dead, you can reload any open tab that needs Flash
and it will come back better behaved. Until the next time it gets into
whatever state causes that complete non-responsiveness.

Note that the alternative to this -- at least in Safari -- is just to have the
browser crash completely occasionally. If you look at the crash dump, it's
still the Flash plugin doing it, though.

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iaskwhy
The new test system looks amazing! I love when companies do that kind of
stuff, it must keep their employees happy!

~~~
potatolicious
It reminds me of a discussion thread we had a few days ago, when people were
lamenting that it took so many billions and trillions of CPU operations to do
relatively simple things today - that we're not really getting the real value
of Moore's Law.

It's heartening to see modern computing power like this :)

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eelinow
Just upgraded and almost immediately had to file a bug report. Flash video
will not play in anything but full screen, and getting to said fullscreen
requires about mouse clicks in quick succession.

I'm running OS X 10.6.3 on dual quad-core xeon (Nehalem 8 Core) Mac Pro with
6gb ram. Chrome is my default browser, and while I am part of the Youtube
Html5 Beta, the inconvenience is rather large. Flash apps are a no-go entirely
as they will not render.

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Maro
Chrome is still missing features that are must have for me from a usability
perspective. The number one is "full page default zoom" (eg. not just text
zoom). For some reason this request is being ignored since 2008:

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8d83bd71bc1a8&hl=en)

~~~
Maro
Correction: there are extensions now:

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=zoom)

EDIT: and they suck.

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_delirium
Weird, I just upgraded on Linux (from 5.0.342.9 to 5.0.375.29) and fonts on a
bunch of sites (like HN) are different now. I wonder what did that.

~~~
buster
This is an interesting read on the state of fonts on Linux/Gnome, read it to
understand some of the complexity:

<http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/>

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not_an_alien
Any way to tweak the auto-update features for Flash? I want to have the
debugger version installed instead, or disable it altogether. :/

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theschwa
I still miss bookmark tagging from FF. In fact, I often keep a FF window open
just so I can keep my bookmarks organized with tags.

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chmike
What I dislike in chrome is that passwords are not secured by a SSO password
like in firefox. What I like in chrome is its thin and lightweight frame.

What I miss in Chrome and Firefox is bookmark synchronization on my own server
because privacy is important to me.

~~~
logic
Weave (<https://mozillalabs.com/weave/>) solves the bookmark (and
configuration in general) synchronization problem for Firefox; I was hosting
my own server quite happily until I switched to Chrome.

Switching was a hard decision for me: I _like_ Firefox, quite a lot, and I'm
very comfortable using it. But on Linux, it's unbearably slow, while Chrome
flies. Once a mostly-workable adblocker was available for Chrome, I didn't
have many reasons left not to switch to something more productive.

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ashishbharthi
Just installed and tried on Win XP. It definitely feels faster than Safari and
Firefox.

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blehn
More good news: pinned tabs are back.

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Shorel
I still prefer Opera, the speed of Chrome, the functionality that Firefox has
to copy.

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rykov
The speed and subtlety of nose-picking is also fantastic (at 0:09 mark)

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apphacker
What kind of specific improvements are they making to the JavaScript engine
that is leading to such dramatic speed increases?

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ddemchuk
does it have firebug yet? That's all I care about. And no, the development
toolbar is not good enough

~~~
TheBranca18
I'd have to say the developer tools are comparable to Firebug and won't freeze
Chrome the way Firebug periodically freezes Firefox.

~~~
ddemchuk
You, my friend, clearly don't use Firebug that much. Until you can add new
attributes to existing selectors in developer tools, it simply cannot compare

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duskwuff
You can also do that with Chrome's builtin inspector.

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ddemchuk
How? It doesn't seem to work like Firebug does where I can just double click
and new attributes...

~~~
Pistos2
Double click to edit any existing attribute; move cursor after semicolon; type
new attribute; press Enter.

