End Transmission

I’ve spent this morning having a little play with Google’s new browser, Chrome. It has some nice ideas in there, but currently the implementation seems less than ideal as almost every site I’ve visited with it has errors or style issues.

I can’t, however, track down whether some of these issues are due to our network wanting me to enter a password to use the browser. For instance our corporate internet site won’t load more than 24 lines of our CSS/JS files, so as you can imagine, our site is somewhat… plain. Thankfully it was designed to be read without stylesheets if necessary. On the plus side, our intranet works with minimal CSS issues.

I think some more testing is needed here to see if the issue is ours or Google’s. It surprises me that they have released something this flakey. [Update: it seems that the CSS/JS corruption we were seeing is somehow related to how Chrome talks to our proxy server as everything works outside of the company network] Hilarity of the day was viewing Google’s own websites in Chrome and watching them all break.

The interface is also plagued with some odd design choices that take a little tweaking to correct. For instance all the usual menus have been removed to produce a minimal interface. All your options and settings are accessed through two icons to the right of the address bar. All well and good until you try and find your favourites or the home button. Both of these need to be switched on in the options screen.

The one thing I do like is the start page that Chrome manages for you. It shows screenshots of the last few websites you visited as well as your favorites and your most recently added links. This doesn’t make the switch from Firefox worth it… yet.

Keep an eye out for more posts on the adventures of Chrome