Thursday, April 22, 2010

Chrome-Design, yes =) ... no =(


Chrome-Design, originally uploaded by Deezplace.

Well I've been using Chrome as much as possible (on PC/Windows) for the last 6 months, and loving it, but all is not roses, or at least so I've discovered since I got back to my Mac.

1st the pluses (for me at least, and therefor in my order of importance =)

Translation: very handy for when dealing with homepages in another language, Chrome offers to translate the page you are viewing. Saves a lot of cut 'n' pasting or redirection via translation sites.

Without a doubt Chrome has the nicest Tab handling. Moving, separating, merging all done effortlessly and (mostly) intuitive. And judging by the (lack of lag - response) speed these processes occur at, the code behind is much improved. Better use of computer (CPU/memory) resources.

The range of plugins for Chrome (which makes Firefox so enabled) is growing rapidly, although I tend to agree with a friend's comment that this is causing FF to become bloatware-ish/sluggish.

The combination of the address and search bar seems a (long overdue) natural evolution.

The options menu is much easier to navigate than the other browsers I usually use (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera).

Now, again for me, the negatives.

I can no longer grab the Bookmark button (the star to the left of the address field) to drag that bookmark to my Bookmarks Toolbar. This was an incredibly quick/handy/idiot proof way to grab a bookmark.
Now I can only click that star which invokes the Bookmark dialogue which saves the bookmark to the bottom of the list of entries in the Bookmark Toolbar. #fail
I was able to do this in Windows but now no more =(

No border; whilst I love good eye candy and especially enjoy borderless video playback, Chrome looks great but I seem to have no handles to move the window about.
The title bar having been compressed down to incorporate the Tab area means that if I have tabs across the full width of the window mean I have no (or very minimal) area that I can click-drag the window if I wish to move it.

edit: I've installed Afloat to alleviate this annoyance, all is pretty good so far.

A pet peeve of mine is that OSX windows can only be resized from the bottom right corner, unlike the "grab any side" of MS Windows. The pro that makes up for that is the way I can grab the bottom border to move the window whereas in the MS scenario I can only have the title (or the Move option in the top left corner menu - means more clicks)

If I've missed a workaround for this I'd be happy to hear about it, I've been alt/command/ctrl and right clicking all over the place looking for other means of moving the window but so far no go.

cheers, I'm sure Google will improve past these issues, it's why I vote for them.

D