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Epic Minor Flaws in Google Chrome

Posted Wed, Aug 5, 2009

FireFox has years of headway on Google when it comes to the browser, which is practically twelve eons in computational evolution.  There are still a few epic flaws that I feel keeps Chrome 2nd on my list. I have to mention the addons, but I don’t want to focus on it.  We all know about the lack of addon support thus far, but I have been able to get past that and use Chrome full time for the past month or so.

 

1)      Selecting text

a.       Text selection just acts weird.  Google, better than most, pays attention to minor annoyances and the extremely effective user interface is what makes Google, Google.  Starting inthe universal bar, double clicking words does not start and stop at wordbreakers as it should.  For example, if I have the URL http://www.xie.com/abc/123 and I want to switch to http://www.xie.com/def/123I should simply be able to double-click on abc and type def.  Because chrome selects abc/ instead of just abc doing this results in http://www.xie.com/def123. 



b.      Now, all browsers have their own issues with selecting text.  For instance, in a website with columns, if you slightly go over the column border, you will get the text that you selected and then the entire column next to it and the footer.  I am used to that, but sometimes Chrome just does some unexpected things.  In the first example below, double clicking on the word monthly selects 3 lines of unnecessary text, where FireFox just grabs the word I need.  There are a few more issues I have had with selecting text, but they are escaping me at the moment.



 

2)      Universal (Omni)Bar

a.       I love the Universal Bar.  I think it is technically called the omni bar, but I am not a fan of the name.  It does many things really, really well.  With sites following the search standard like amazon.com you can type ‘amazon.com’ in to the bar, then press Tab and then type your query which will in turn search Amazon with Amazon’s search.  It is very different than the “site:amazon.com” operation because it actually uses the site’s search instead of Google’s search.  However, if you try to use the “site:” operator it doesn’t work quite right.  I can type into the bar “site:digg.com” and get a listing of every page indexed by the site.  However, if I add a search query“site:digg.com nfl” it doesn’t do anything. It works sometimes and not others. It looks like sites that work with the tab feature I just mentioned do not work with the “site:” search.

Update: Google released a new beta of Chrome today.  The "site:" operator now automatically converts into these site's search.  Awesome.

Tagged google chrome

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