Matt Cutts of Google posted yesterday about the ten things he doesn’t like about Chrome. Coming from a Google employee, this seems like brave transparency — but Matt’s list is pretty much a collection of nits. I use Google Chrome as my default browser, and in general I love it — especially its performance. But I have a few more serious things about Google Chrome that I dislike:
- No RSS autodiscovery. I consume all of my regular sites through feeds, and I like the fact that Firefox (and Opera, and Safari, and even IE7) provide a consistent way to at least find the feed URL for any site that includes an RSS autodiscovery link. Firefox even lets you customize how to handle subscriptions — mine is set to feed it (pun intended) to FeedDemon — so subscribing to a feed I like is only one click away. In Google Chrome, there is no button to subscribe, and if I load a URL that contains an RSS feed, it just displays as HTML (ignoring all the RSS tags). I have to manually copy the URL and paste it into my feed reader.
- I know Matt said not to mention it, but lack of cross-platform support is a major deficit. Eventually Google will get around to releasing versions for MacOS/X and Linux — but what about FreeBSD?
- Perhaps the biggest gaping hole is the lack of support for extensions — but hopefully that one will be remedied soon.
- Keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to work all the time. I haven’t narrowed down exactly when, but sometimes Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab, and Ctrl+C sometimes doesn’t copy to the clipboard. In the same contexts, I can select “New Tab” from the wrench menu or “Copy” from the context menu, and they work as expected. This is a big one for a hater of Mus computerus like me.
- Chrome seems to give up on links faster than Firefox (it does everything faster, even fail). I get a lot more page load failures that are remedied by F5. It also gives up on linked stylesheets, resulting in an unformatted page until I refresh. There should be some way to tweak the timeout. Maybe there is, but I haven’t found it yet.
None of these are show-stoppers for me yet, but if/when I change my main workstation to FreeBSD then #2 will be.
How about you? If you’ve used Chrome for any length of time, what bugs you about it?
