Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux (opens in new tab)

For everyone asking what's wrong with Chrome's URL bar, here's one specific example I run into.

I go visit Google Analytics relative often. In Firefox, I can start typing analytics.. and it pulls up GA as an option very quickly. With chrome it never shows up at all, instead I have to start typing google, and it'll show up as the 3rd or 4th option.

It's hard to remember all the specific annoyances, but this is one of a handful where FF's awesome bar really outshines Chromes. Now I'm willing to make the tradeoff because Chrome on linux is still MUCH faster the FF.

That's an interesting opposing view; because the thing that hooked me on Chrome was the address bar.

I can no longer function efficiently in other browsers because, for me anyway, it is so streamlined.

I think we can all agree that Safari is the furthest behind in this regard. For a company that takes pride in stripping things down to the bare essentials, having an address bar and a search bar is becoming obnoxious.

What don't you like about Chrome's address bar? It auto-completes as well, it will even auto-fill a URL for a site you've never been to before. Having search in the same box is usually faster for me, the only time I hit a snag is when I'm searching for something that can be confused with a URL.

I suppose it's all relative, but to me FireFox feels cumbersome in comparison to Chrome. I only open it up to test sites on.

I agree with you and I rate Firefox search bookmarks as an even bigger plus. Life is short and I don't want to waste it by having to go to a site such as wikipedia or a multi-lingual dictionary first and then search and wait for a second page to load.

What do you mean with the address bar? Chromes bar also has autocompletion. I even find it simpler to use. In Firefox, I have to press the down-key + enter to select a suggestion. In Chrome, I just have to press enter.

What do you think is missing otherwise in Chrome?

I think the overall user experience is probably much better compared to Firefox in nearly all aspects.

They are for anyone using node.js.

Just like you, many things that are keeping me from switching to Chrome from FF but the biggest one for me, and perhaps lots of FF users out there, is faithfulness. We have known it's a pain (since Chrome’s appearance) but we can bear with it because at least, FF doesn't leave their users behind.

They are working on new Javascript engine which targets to a significant improvement in speed: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mozilla-jagermonkey-method-based...

They are also working on stability and I would bet it will be much better than Chrome (my friend is using Chrome and he reported lots of crashes even though it is designed for "crash free" at beginning). http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/firefox_implement_outo...

FF is playing catch up on these issues but hopefully, with all other stuffs (Weave, Contact, Account Manager...) that Mozilla is investing in, FF will be the world champion in browser competition market!

For me, it's the lack of addons that can radically change the UI. In Firefox, I run Vimperator (there's a few addons that are catching up to it in Chrome, but they cannot hide the various toolbars afaik), Hide Title Bar (minor, but nice to have), and Tree Style Tabs (essential. Chrome cannot handle large numbers of tabs, and all the addons I've seen that attempt to handle this issue aren't nearly as nice). The UI is almost unrecognizable, but I actually like the set up. Unfortunately, Chrome simply cannot do that type of modification, at least as far as I know. I'd be very happy to be proven wrong here. The speed of Chrome is fantastic, I just wish it had those few addons.

RSS reader: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=... (yes, not built in, but quite easy to install ;) )

Does it have Adblock+ yet? Until that's in Chrome, I'll be using Firefox.

My list of things keeping from Chrome is same as yours though I'd also add lack of google gears support. I don't understand how they have that for firefox but they don't have it from Chrome. In addition to this Chrome (on the mac) crashes quite frequently for me.

I'd have to say the developer tools are comparable to Firebug and won't freeze Chrome the way Firebug periodically freezes Firefox.

Works in any browser:

http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite

It reminds me of a discussion thread we had a few days ago, when people were lamenting that it took so many billions and trillions of CPU operations to do relatively simple things today - that we're not really getting the real value of Moore's Law.

It's heartening to see modern computing power like this :)

They have some more small little artsy videos they did for Chrome's features, which I've never seen before: http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features_mac.html

Correction: there are extensions now:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...

EDIT: and they suck.

I have 5.0.342.9 beta (Mac) and full page zoom is default.

If you haven't quit the browser in awhile, this can happen. The good news is that in Chrome you can kill just the flash plugin without losing the rest of your browsing session (I usually do this by opening the Activity monitor and killing it from there; usually at that point you can see that the Flash plugin has gone completely nuts eating memory...)

Once the Flash plugin is dead, you can reload any open tab that needs Flash and it will come back better behaved. Until the next time it gets into whatever state causes that complete non-responsiveness.

Note that the alternative to this -- at least in Safari -- is just to have the browser crash completely occasionally. If you look at the crash dump, it's still the Flash plugin doing it, though.

This is an interesting read on the state of fonts on Linux/Gnome, read it to understand some of the complexity:

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/fonts/

Weave (https://mozillalabs.com/weave/) solves the bookmark (and configuration in general) synchronization problem for Firefox; I was hosting my own server quite happily until I switched to Chrome.

Switching was a hard decision for me: I like Firefox, quite a lot, and I'm very comfortable using it. But on Linux, it's unbearably slow, while Chrome flies. Once a mostly-workable adblocker was available for Chrome, I didn't have many reasons left not to switch to something more productive.