The obligatory Chrome backlash
2008-09-13 / 19:40 / dave
Since waxing poetically about chrome, I’ve hit a few more snags. So now… THE BACKLASH!
A futile search
“Find in page” doesn’t search text I entered! So when I’m, say, editing my WordPress posts, I can’t search within the edit box. I know, I know another reason to actually get APP working…
This turns out to be a known bug with WebKit: Bug #269
The problems with bookmark keywords
I loved Firefox’s bookmark keywords. If you’re not familiar, you basically assign a keyboard shortcut for a bookmark. For instance I assigned “rlike” to the Reddit upvote bookmarklet so I could vote without touching the mouse (well, mouse nub on the Thinkpad). It’s Ubiquity lite.
Chrome separates bookmarks (static, no keywords) from “Search Engines”, which seems like a strange design decision. I’d prefer them to be integrated or to at least allow the magic Omnibox to search through your local bookmarks. It is the Omnibox after all.
Adding search engines also has some problems. Primarily, { isn’t allowed, which pretty much kills javascript bookmarklets. The second is a minor UI issue: there’s no quick visual feedback for failed input. Hence:
- Bug 2238: Add search engine dialog doesn’t allow “{” (open curly brace); can interfere with javascript
- Bug 2239: Add Search Engine dialog: green checkmark icons indicate success even for failed input
Well do something about it
Turns out Chromium doesn’t build under Visual Studios Express, but that’s an ordeal for another post.
I’ve been using it since the day it was released. I’m pretty happy with it, with the exception of no add-ins. Also… ALSO… it really, really has a tough time with flash video. I find that it locks up for minutes at a time while watching youtube clips over three minutes long. The stream keeps going; I can hear the audio. But the video freezes and all chrome windows and tabs become unresponsive. You experience this?
For a real stress test that should surely cause the issue to manifest – go watch an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia at http://www.hulu.com.
It’s been fine for YouTube and (surprise surprise) Google Video for me. Sometimes it seems to get confused and not play online music samples (like from Amazon’s mp3 store), but shutting down seems to fix it.
My question about your search problem is… does it find matches for “WTF!”?
For the record, I’m prepared to have you explain to me (in technical programmer terms) why that’s a stupid question and why the exclamation point doesn’t matter.
-A
Hey Aaron,
Nope, doesn’t find “WTF!” either. You could certainly make a search where it would matter (if you had to match a whole word), but I don’t think most people do that. Anyway, no progrmamer terms… I just know that it’s a real bug, the Chrome & WebKit guys said so ;)