Christian Geekery

The substance of things hoped for…

Browsing Posts tagged Google Chrome

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Dan Shafer wrote that Chrome; “Cool but Not (Yet) Compelling on Mac
I agree with most of what Dan says, but have found that for myself Chrome is compelling and just stable enough for me to continue using it as my primary browser, at least for now.

Firefox is pretty bloated, but powerful enough due to its plugins, to continue to be valuable for many.  Safari is very fast, sometimes I can not tell the difference in speed between Chrome and Safari, but Safari has less critical (for me at least) extensions then FireFox does.  That is how it was, until The Chrome folks added extensions for Mac in the dev channel.  Shortly after that 1Password came through with a very alpha  extension that works pretty well for logging in.

One of my biggest gripes that I share with Dan is the inability to open a group of bookmarks into tabs.  Today I started looking around and found a workaround for part of the problem.  The extension is called “Sticky Tabs” and it gives you a way to save urls that open as tabs when you start up Chrome.  I will keep looking through the extensions and see if there is a better solution, or perhaps the developer of Sticky Tabs, could be convinced that adding a bit more functionality would be a good idea.

I run roughly twice the Chrome extensions then the number of plugins I run on Firefox with no obvious slowdowns in Chrome like I see in Firefox.  Not too shabby for Chrome, eh?

So for now I am still using Chrome as my main browser, even if I do occasionally wonder about the G-men taking over the digital world.

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Image representing Google Chrome as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

I have been using Google Chrome almost exclusively since extensions became available to the Mac in the dev channel.  Today I worked out the last issue that I had with not being able to log in to Springloops, and discovered that there is an alpha version extension for 1Password.  Chrome is so much faster then Firefox, perhaps a bit faster then Safari, and I have some very useful extensions!  I may have reached the tipping point where I will no longer fall back on Firefox and Safari for more then testing.  Not bad at all!

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I have been playing with the dev channel Google Chrome for Mac for about a week now, and so far it is pretty cool.  I took a glance at it a number of months ago, but only for a very short time since there was no extension support, or bookmark management.

This is not to say that there are no problems.  for example, I can not log into one of my most important sites, springloops.com.
Another issue that is is not Chromes fault, is the lack of an extension for 1Password, which they say is in development now.

There are already some very nice extensions available.  My current list of installed extensions that I am experimenting with are:

  • Better Gmail - Version: 1.992
  • Evernote Web Clipper - Version: 1.1
  • Firebug Lite - Version: 1.25
  • Google Mail Checker Plus - Version: 1.1.5
  • Google Similar Pages beta (by Google) - Version: 0.5.2.19
  • Google Voice Notifier (by Google) - Version: 1.0.2.1
  • Google Wave Notifier - Version: 2.2
  • Send from Gmail (no button) - Version: 1.11.1
  • Zemanta - Version: 0.5.1

Overall, this is more then I normally use with FireFox, and I will probably pare it done quite a bit after a while.  For example I generally use MailPlane for gmail access, better gmail  and Google mail checker will go away if I revert.

Zemanta is one of the most intriguing extensions at this time.  Zemanta finds keywords in posts and searches for related stories, and will even create links in your text automagically…

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