As much as I want to like and to use Chrome, several problems are
still preventing me from switching, among which:
- No plug-ins. This is probably the most glaring hole. The best way to
- No title bar. I don’t know what the team was thinking or if it was
a deliberate omission, but the fact that the title bar doesn’t
contain the title of the current HTML page makes it very hard for me
to navigate through the multitude of browser windows that I usually
work with. Having to go to the task bar to know which window is
which is very lame. - Menu bar in a weird location. What’s up with all
these developers that keep thinking that reinventing user interfaces
is cool? It’s not. Putting the menu bar in the middle right area
just to save 16 vertical pixels is dumb. Respect user’s UI muscle
memory and put the menus and their menu items in the expected location. - No keyword search. Failing to have plug-ins, I could live with just
being able to specify keyword searches. For people not familiar
with this concept that came from Firefox, it lets you define
variable URL’s that you can type directly in the address bar with
different values. For example, I have a Wikipedia
keyword that I assigned to “w” that lets me type “w saturn” in the
address bar and that will show me that entry on the sixth planet of
our solar system in Wikipedia right
away. I have defined a multitude of these keywords (e.g. searching
a colleague in our employee database, looking up a stock symbol,
etc…) but Chrome is making me less productive by forcing me to
have to do extra typing and clicking. - No “Reload all tabs”. Ok, maybe that’s just me, but I use this all
the time on Firefox. On Chrome, I find myself having to go on
all my tabs and press “Reload” on each of them. Again, the Chrome team didn’t have to
incorporate this feature in 1.0 but a plug-in API
would have guaranteed to make this a non-issue.
ship a product with features that you know are missing is to give
developers a chance to implement these features for you. Firefox
has made plug-ins an inseparable concept of the browser, it’s really
a pity that Chrome didn’t follow in its footsteps and thought that
v1.0 could ship without plug-ins.
As it stands right now, the fact that Chrome is the fastest Web
browser on the planet is not enough to make me use it on a regular
basis as long as these functionalities remain absent…