Google Chrome Posted at 26 Jun 2010 10:49:31 AM

Now that this browser is finally workable - for me at least - I thought that I'd start with a mini-review of it.

Chrome is fast. You already know that; it's been Google's main plug for the browser since the beginning. We'll take its speed as read.

Although it's taking some time to break the Firefox-induced habit of making a new tab and immediately hitting Ctrl+K to get to a search bar, I think I'm going to like Chrome's multi-use location/search/bookmarking bar. It's certainly handy to be able to create a new tab and immediately start typing search terms without having to worry about which input box has focus.

I think it's interesting how new browsers just hitting the landscape have to not be as good as their predecessors, but better. Most of us won't look at a new browser unless it encompasses all functions for which we depend on our existing browser of choice AND offers us something more. Just good browsing isn't enough; it's got to have a truly enormous variety of extensions before we're even remotely interested.

For instance: I wouldn't touch Chrome (much less use it as a daily browser) until it had a viable mouse gestures plugin. I checked back regularly for progress on Google's own version of the plugin; it consistently failed to work, so I kept passing on the browser. And apparently, I sat on that particular high horse just a bit too long; Google's own plugin is still rocky*, yes, but Smooth Gestures is up and doing its thing reasonably well. It's not perfect, mind you - the comments regarding issues with https pages and occasional extension crashes are accurate - but it's good enough.

*And by "rocky" I mean "back and forward work, everything else is a complete wash-out."

There are several viable AdBlock extensions now. I don't use any of them except FlashBlock, but I know that this was a deal-breaker for some of you.

Beautify Facebook is nifty, if purely cosmetic.

I'm using Google Wave Notifier to save me from having to have my iGoogle page and gWave pages open all the time. There's a similar gadget for your gMail account, but I prefer the toys and widgets of my complete iGoogle page.

There's a Del.icio.us plugin, which works as expected.

Send from Gmail (no button) is still untried, but if it saves me from having an Outlook mail window pop up every time I click on a mailto: link, it'll be worth it.

Since I see that Chrome is available for Linux now as well (tiny cheer!), I'll be updating my computers at home and seeing how many of these extensions are cross-platform. (Hint: they'd better all be).

Tagged as: i do a lot of dumb shit just for the geek cred