Google Chrome

insinkerator

The Beta was officially released today..


Thoughts?

Personally i dont notice any major speed improvements over firefox, although i think it might be tad better looking, havent decided yet.

Will be firmly sticking with FF until more addons are released for Chrome.

ozt9vdujny3srf

If it's speed you want, then safari > firefox. I agree that firefox is a bit ugly but i still keep as a second browser for when i need certain add-ons that have been built for it.

Chrome isn't as big a thing for mac users as it was for windows, as we already have an excellent webkit based browser in safari with a good js engine. Having said that I use chrome on windows, and will continue to check its progress every so often on the mac, it already seems to have a slightly faster Javascript engine then safari, and given Googles love of web apps, may well end up being the best browser to run web apps in out there.

insinkerator

Actually, Chrome in fact seems slower to me than Firefox.

Safari is a little faster than Firefox for me, but the adblock for it has never worked just right, and it lacks any other addons that i am accustomed to in FF

dubmick

Nalani Dead Spatula wrote: »

If it's speed you want, then safari > firefox. I agree that firefox is a bit ugly but i still keep as a second browser for when i need certain add-ons that have been built for it.

^ This

Although Camino is faster than both of them but I prefer Safari.

projectmayhem

On both my Macbook Pro & iMac running 10.6 for the last few weeks (with the dev build) I've found Chrome to be amazing. Works very smooth, light and fast. Faster then firefox for sure. I'm sure FF renders pages quickly, but it takes time for it to number crunch with all the bloatware installed on it sadly.

I'm not a fan of Safari so Chrome has been my default for weeks now. The only problem I have with it is that it consistently asks to save passwords, but never auto-completes forms for me... and the fact that Google making a browser (and now DNS service) is kind of like BMW making roads, it sort of feels wrong.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

banquo

Heard good things about the mac version. I love the pc version - my main browser for a year - but yet to install it on the aul MacBook.

Sad Professor

Nice and fast - I like it.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

I've been using Chromium for ages on my mac, it's blazing fast.

Creamy Goodness

chrome beta > safari > firefox tbh.

chrome wins out because i prefer it's layout and controls more so than safari. firefox is just ****e in comparison tbh.

Mars Bar

I'm liking google chrome a lot, it's got a cleaner look about it and it's running faster than FF for me in my student accommodation...

silvine

I liked the minimal feel to it but I'm not convinced it's much faster than Firefox or Safari.

EDIT: It is a bit snappier on Boards.ie.

And does anyone find that when a page in one one tab is loading a page in another tab
becomes unresponsive?

conchubhar1

Chrome is as fast as Safari.
Both trump Firefox.

Firefox is the only one you can do most things on though for the moment.

I was listening to some Twit podcast and I think it was Gina who made the excellent point along the lines of - do you really want extensions in Chrome, you use it because it is fast - Firefox is there when you need specific tasks.

conchubhar1

silvine wrote: »

And does anyone find that when a page in one one tab is loading a page in another tab
becomes unresponsive?

Not on my macbook but on Windows yes - but granted it is an xp machine with 256 ram so..... expected in ways but Firefox never crashes or becomes unresponsive if I just use tabs but is really slow.

Gerard_Smith

Might replace Safari as my full time browser once the extensions are implemented. I'm a long time Firefox fan but its just too much of a mess at the moment.

For one thing I am sick to death Mozillas inability to fix flash performance. The browser has dropped frames through all it's incarnations but still the dance continues; Mozilla blames Adobe, Adobe blames Mozilla and nothing gets done. Its also feeling pretty darn slow these days

Mars Bar

Can I ask what are all the add - ons people associate with FF? I just used it for...well, the internet, bookmarked pages and that's about as far as it went for me.

I had problems the last two weeks loading the Elton John forum on FF and it wouldn't show any profile pic thumbnails on Facebook, changed to chrome and both have been fine for me. It did sign me outta boards automatically once last night, that's the only glitch I've had so far.

conchubhar1

I can only speak for me but i would imagine most people are the same -

It would be faster listing what addons we dont use - so so many out there.

Mars Bar

Oh okay, didn't think you'd need any more than what it comes with!

conchubhar1

Ah no thats the beauty of ff - you need and can add more.

http://lifehacker.com/5205629/

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Only add-ons I use are AdBlock and Greasemonkey.

silvine

Autopager is a pretty sweet add-on for Firefox.

ozt9vdujny3srf

Interesting post from macrumors:
http://www.macrumors.com/2009/12/09/chrome-for-mac-beta-nearly-matches-safari-in-javascript-benchmarking/

Elessar

I'm a firm Safari user myself. It's fast, smooth, uncluttered and responsive. I love the topsites feature. Tried Chrome ages ago on the mac and tbh it didn't offer anything new. Will be sticking to Safari for the time being.

insinkerator

So i have been sticking with chrome for the past few days, just to give it a fair chance.

On second thought, it is a little faster than FF, although i do sorely miss adblock. One thing about it, that is extremely annoying, to the point of putting me off it completely, is that it doesn't support the MB touchpad 3 finger swipe to jump directly to the bottom of the page, when FF and safari both do.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

insinkerator wrote: »

So i have been sticking with chrome for the past few days, just to give it a fair chance.

On second thought, it is a little faster than FF, although i do sorely miss adblock. One thing about it, that is extremely annoying, to the point of putting me off it completely, is that it doesn't support the MB touchpad 3 finger swipe to jump directly to the bottom of the page, when FF and safari both do.

[Fn]+

should go to the end of a page.

insinkerator

Thats handy, but the mouse gesture is just so much more convenient.

And i was wrong about safari supporting it, im on it now and it doesnt work. Looks like its only safari that does it.

Although the fn and left/right button works in safari too.

silvine

I use Safari from time to time that it stops loading pages for some reason and I have to click reload. This doesn't happen with Firefox. Weird.

oneofakind32

I think I'll be giving chrome a trial period! Safari dosent run that fast on my current machiene!

Mars Bar

insinkerator wrote: »

Thats handy, but the mouse gesture is just so much more convenient.

And i was wrong about safari supporting it, im on it now and it doesnt work. Looks like its only safari that does it.

Although the fn and left/right button works in safari too.

I think you mean it's only FF that does it! :P

I had to read it twice to make sense of it!

Earthhorse

Not quite as neat and nice as it is on the PC. Don't quite know what the difference is, just doesn't "feel" the same. Still a nippy browser but not much to choose between it and FireFox (which if you're finding slow you probably have "too many" add-ons installed).

Gummy Panda

How stable is chrome?

I'm not a fan of it on PCs. I find Safari pretty fast on my mac and doesn't have the bloat that FF seems to have.

I also like the coverflow for main sites.

Earthhorse

Been using it for the last two days and it hasn't crashed or thrown any silly errors at me. But I was recently told I wasn't a "power user" of browsers by someone in work so take from that what you will.

banquo

Those assholes are everywhere. ''I like my browser'', ''That's because you're stupid'', '':(''

snowyeoghan

I'm really liking Chrome.
I find that firefox is crap when it comes to youtube, constantly dropping frames, and safari wrecks my head regarding new tabs and windows and remembering passwords. Safari also feels bulky.
Chrome just seems to work.

I like

projectmayhem

snowyeoghan wrote: »

Chrome just seems to work.

I like

Yep. It feels like a browser designed by programmers who actually use the web in the same way real people do. People who know what a browser is, so instead of pandering to tossers who want the browser to baby them through the internet, chrome removes the bloat and does what it should do - render sites, quickly.

spidermonkey

I have been using it with about days and so far so good!

Daysha

Does anyone else get this bug when using expose? The blue bar appears when you roll the mouse over it, and since I use expose all the time having that empty space is really off-putting.

That aside, while it's a good browser, I've been using Firefox for the best part of 3 years and I can't get used to any other browser without addons like Adblock, linkification, text-to-image etc.

One thing I really like about it though is having mini-logos in your bookmarks menu bar. You can do that on the Windows FF but not on Mac for some reason, you have to stick with normal text.

Sad Professor

Does anyone know to get PDF files to open within Chrome?

snowyeoghan

Daysha wrote: »

Does anyone else get this bug when using expose?

Nope. Works grand with expose...

conchubhar1

Sad Professor wrote: »

Does anyone know to get PDF files to open within Chrome?

Chrome - well google in general seems to have problems with pdfs on a mac.

I dunno why osx is so pdf friendly.

Gerard_Smith

I like it. It's elegant, fast and so far solid as a rock. Flash performance is still not quite Safari level (in that I have seen drop a few frames once on a HD video) but infinitely better than Firefox.

As for PDFs there is an official extension available to Windows users that opens PDF files online with google docs. I wouldn't be surprised its that ends up beginning the default waychrome handles PDFs. Lord knows its better than adobes plug-in :rolleyes:

insinkerator

I have changed it to my default browser for the time being.

Im really starting to miss adblock and the three finger swipe though. I could probably live without the rest of my FF addons though

Sad Professor

The latest build of Chromium supports extensions. Some of them don't work though. But AdThwart seems to work more or less.

You could also use GlimmerBlocker - it blocks ads before they even get to the browser.

insinkerator

I just downloaded it there, but i can't seem to get it to work

insinkerator

Ah nevermind. Works now.

Thanks

Sad Professor

Gerard_Smith wrote: »

As for PDFs there is an official extension available to Windows users that opens PDF files online with google docs. I wouldn't be surprised its that ends up beginning the default waychrome handles PDFs. Lord knows its better than adobes plug-in :rolleyes:

Yeah, I've just been trying this extension out with Chromium - it works really well. Although it only works in instances where Googledocs is able to retrieve the file. So it doesn't work on pdf files on secure sites, such as my college documents. Great for everything else though.

Daysha

insinkerator wrote: »

Im really starting to miss adblock and the three finger swipe though. I could probably live without the rest of my FF addons though

You need Multiclutch, a software program that maps keyboard shortcuts to specific multi-touch gestures for apps of your choice

The great thing about Multiclutch is the level of customisation that comes with it. As long as what you want to do has a keyboard shortcut, you can create a gesture for it. So for instance in Chrome and Firefox I have it set to 3 fingers swipes up/down to go to the top/bottom of the page, and 3 fingers swipes left/right to go back/forward a page. You can also set zoom or rotate gestures as well, though I don't use them as much.

The UI is done via a System Preferences panel so it's very easy to use. Just pick an app, choose a gesture and map it to a specific keyboard shortcut. It works for the vast majority of the Mac programs out there like iTunes, iCal, MacMail, Quicksilver and Adium so there's no harm in giving it a go at least.

conchubhar1

whats the latest version of chrome?

i have 4.0.249.49 beta - says its the latest and no extensions still

Daysha

conchubhar1 wrote: »

whats the latest version of chrome?

i have 4.0.249.49 beta - says its the latest and no extensions still

Extensions are only available on the latest Windows beta of Chrome unfortunately.

Sad Professor

Extensions work on the latest builds of Chromium. That's what I've been using for weeks now.

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-mac/

conchubhar1

ah chromium - should have read your post properly.

i downloaded and installed it - tbh im not liking chrome, think ill leave chromium and chrome until it matures a bit.