Google Chrome browser

I've been a Firefox browser user for quite some time - gosh, it must be at least five or six years at this point. But a month or so ago, I read something that convinced me that I should give Google Chrome another chance. From the beginning, Google has claimed that Chrome was more stable because of it's architecture; each new browser tab is its own process, so crashing one will not, in theory, crash all of them (they even made a virtual comic book about it to explain it better). The article I read said that Chrome has made some strides in speed over the other browsers, and I had been increasingly dissatisfied particularly with startup time in Firefox. Chrome also recently (finally) started supporting extensions, which are a favorite feature of Firefox, so I decided to dip my toes in and give it a try!

First I had to try and find some extensions that resembled the ones I use every day on Firefox. I had been using Echofon as my Twitter client; I didn't find anything I was happy with as a Twitter client, but eventually I tried out the desktop version of TweetDeck and now I use it instead (I even uninstalled Echofon from Firefox). I installed the Chrome version of Shareaholic (which, incidentally, I like better than the Firefox version... come on, guys, let's implement that "save your services in the cloud" thing on Firefox!) and WiseStamp, and both were wonderful. The Chrome version of Xmarks is also terrific. I couldn't find a direct port of Gmail Notifier, which is a staple for me, so I tried Google's tray app (ew) and finally discovered the excellent Chrome extension One Number which not only notifies of new Gmail messages, but also handles notifications for Google Reader, Google Voice, and Google Wave. Nice!

On the whole, I was able to find Chrome extensions that either are the same thing as Firefox extensions, or have basically the same functionality. The one cross-browser extension that I was really disappointed in was iMacros. The Firefox version is pretty solid, and in fact I use it almost every day, but the Chrome version (which, to be fair, is still in beta) is slow and buggy. I actually had to resort to opening up Firefox whenever I needed to use iMacros... not high praise for their Chrome development efforts.

Another thing I use quite extensively on Firefox is called "search shortcuts". If I type g Google Chrome into my browser URL bar, it's the same as if I loaded up Google.com and typed Google Chrome into the search box. If I type gn Google Chrome instead, it looks it up on Google News. Setting this up in Firefox is incredibly easy (if you don't know how, check this link for details), and it uses regular bookmarks, which means that my search shortcuts get synchronized through Xmarks so I only have to set them up once for many installations of Firefox. It is possible to set up something similar in Chrome, but it is convoluted and it does not use regular bookmarks, so you have to set it up on each installation of Chrome. That was my first sign that Chrome might not work out for me.

My next indicator came on my underpowered old machine at home. The first time I tried Chrome, the day it was first released, I found it too memory-hungry to run reliably on a computer without gobs of memory for it to chow down on. I discovered that things haven't gotten much better; eventually I had to quit using Chrome on my home machine. I did keep using it at work, though, hoping that it would prove more stable than Firefox. Firefox is by no means a crashy browser, but it does crater every once in a while; I wanted to see if Chrome could best it in the stability department.

Once again I was disappointed. In my experience and with my usage patterns, Chrome seems to crash just about as often as Firefox... it just has its own special ways of crashing. And it's not at good at recovering my session when I restart it, either. With Firefox, when I crash usually I get most or all of my tabs back when I restart; with Chrome that rarely works, even though it's supposed to. In addition, Chrome doesn't seem to like to be left alone for any amount of time; if I left it running for an hour and went to lunch, often when I tried to use it again it would be non-responsive.

Yesterday I gave up on Chrome and went back to using Firefox everywhere. Except for a few extensions that I liked a lot on Chrome and which aren't available for Firefox, I couldn't really find anything about Chrome that would give it an advantage. Firefox is a solid, mature browser with lots of functionality and a large user base; Chrome is a fairly young browser with some style and flash, but not as much substance behind the glamor as I had hoped. I wish Chrome the best, and maybe at some point I'll give it another spin, but for now, I'm still a Firefox fan.

Google Sidewiki

A few days ago Google announced a new project of theirs: Google Sidewiki. Visit that link for details, but the gist is that if you have the Google Toolbar installed, you can browse the Web with a new sidekick on the edge of your browser. This sidekick will comment on the page you are looking at for you, and you can in turn comment on the page as well. The idea is that experts can add more information, say about a medical or science page. But any page can have a Sidewiki, and some of the information will apparently be generated automatically based on other pages, blog posts, etc. Here's Google's video about it:



This is not a particularly new idea. I remember years ago, someone introduced a browser plugin that you could use to comment directly on Web pages... almost like taking out your can of spray paint and tagging the page with your gang sign. The reason that didn't fly at the time was this: Web page owners don't WANT people adding content to their Web pages. If they did, they would add comment boxes at the bottom. By piggybacking other content onto an existing site, you're infringing on the page owner's right to control what comes up when their domain name is accessed. I don't know if there is a legal challenge there (I doubt it), but there is certainly a moral responsibility to not "walk on my lawn", so to speak. I don't remember what the name of that project was, but this post mentions a couple of other current similar

And what about pages that do already have a commenting mechanism? What about this page, for example? It looks like that's already happening... read to the bottom of this page and you'll find that the page's author wound up having to mess with two sets of comment threads, one on his page and one in the sidewiki. Kind of a pain in the neck for the page author, don't you think?

And what am I supposed to do when someone emails me and says they saw something specifically on one of my pages, but it wasn't actually there? It was in Sidewiki, and I don't know about it. Or it was in Sidewiki when they visited the page, but it has since been deleted, moved, demoted, or otherwise obscured, so now even if I look at Sidewiki, I still don't see it. Users are not always educated very well in the tools they're using; this adds a layer of complexity that I'm not interested in trying to deal with.

I can't imagine how Google will deal with exceptions to the standard "rules" in Web page design: dynamically-generated pages and pages that utilize frames, for example. I know frames are oh-so-1997, but I was just updating a framed site for a friend of mine. Does Sidewiki follow the frame on the left, or the frame on the right? I hope the one on the right, because that's where the content is. But do I as the Webmaster have any control over what page Sidewiki follows? I don't think so.

In order to see the Sidewiki, you apparently have to be using Google Toolbar in your browser (actually, it looks like it may have to be this special version of the toolbar). I am not interested in adding toolbars to my browsers. I use tons of Firefox add-ons, but not toolbars. Why? Because a toolbar is a jack-of-all-trades, and we know how many things a JOAT is a master of. I would MUCH rather pick and choose only the "tools" I want to use rather than have a whole "toolbar" foisted on me. As often as not, they are resource hogs, and the last thing I need is one more piece of software eating my CPU cycles and dragging down my performance. So I avoid toolbars, and unless Google comes out with a Firefox add-in to see their Sidewiki (and since they've created a public API, I'm sure someone will do it very soon), I probably won't ever see it... and even if I do eventually see it, it will be only to protect the content of my own pages, not as a willing participant.