Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux | Hacker News Reader

Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux

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Probably the single thing that keeps me using Firefox is its address bar. It's a much nicer experience than Chrome's, with its user-friendly auto complete mechanisms.

The speed of the browsers is rarely the bottleneck for me anymore. I'll switch to Chrome for intense javascript experiences, but that's about it. I feel like chrome needs to start focusing more time on the experience - these speed improvements aren't paying dividends anymore.

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.

I concur with rottencupcakes, the FF "AwesomeBar" is still a bit more... awesome than Chrome's. It isn't just auto-url completion, it does a fair bit more completion and analysis to suggest what you're trying to type.

While I use Chrome as default, I too miss Firefox autocompletion.

In Firefox, I would just start typing "Hacker News" and HN would popup as a first suggestion after first letter, probably based on usage frequency.

The only way to get the same result in Chrome, is to start typing "news.ycombinator.com", which means you have to remember url, not the name. Chrome, will surely find by "Hacker News" too, but I will need to type in at least 5-6 characters for that.

That might be why I prefer Chrome's. I usually type URLs, only fall back to typing titles if I don't remember the URL, and it really annoys me how often Firefox will take me to the wrong site unless I type a fairly large prefix of the URL. In Chrome I can just type ne..., while in Firefox I have to go all the way to news.y... before it'll give me the right completion.

As far as I can tell, both browsers have basic learning algorithms that are supposed to predict better over time what site you want (in both Chrome and Firefox I can now just type 'n' to get to Hacker News).

However, even though I currently use Chrome as my primary browser, I think Firefox still gets this slightly better - I think it learned more quickly and accurately for me at least.

Huh, when I write "hac" the top suggestion in Chrome (well, Chromium daily) is HN.

Other than the first suggestion, you have to use the down arrow in Chrome to use the completions. In Firefox, you cycle through them using tab just like completion in every other app (e.g, bash, ipython, anything using readline).

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.

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.

Same thing for me. The possibility to integrate search engines (or other forms) with a keyword is what keeps me in Chrome.

I have to agree though that FFs autocomplete feature is better. Chrome only seems to match addresses if you type their beginning.

Firefox has also had this feature for a while, right click > 'Add a Keyword for this Search' which is indispensable.

Not the same. Chrome automatically picks up every search engine you use.

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.

I suspect this is either a product of what is familiar to individuals or of different browsers suiting different surfing styles.

For me FF never seems to pull up Google analytics for "analytics" but I only have to get to "anal"[1] before it appears as #1 in Chrome.

The algorithms probably train better for different people

1. There is probably some ironic joke in there somewhere :)

I suspect it's a matter of time, at least for Firefox if not for Chrome. Firefox's is mainly frequency based, so it needs a little while to train.

It took 2-3 weeks for FF's bar to really start to get awesome for me.

I use Chrome instead of FF despite the address bar. Other annoyances:

- Address you enter disappears when you hit enter, doesn't reappear until the page loads. This is a problem if the page spins for a long time; it can be indistinguishable from a total failure.

- Type-ahead will occasionally find matches like "ha" -> "Hacker News" despite the address being "news.ycombinator.com" which is good, but... When you type the "c", that result will disappear! It's really unpredictable and that makes it hard to use.

- The status bar's "..." replacement can be good, but it occasionally elides the important part of an address, like "...blogspot.com/..." Not useful.

That said, Chrome is vastly more usable (on OS X) than FF just because of its speed and stability. I only use FF for Firebug now.

If you're on the dev channel, web inspector has improved immensely. It's seriously cut down on the amount of time I've had to spend in FF.

Great job pulling out some of the other annoyances. I've definitely been bitten by that one.

While both Chrome and FF's systems are probably better than it ever was, I still miss Galeon's old URL completion bar. It essentially behaved like tab completion in bash. So when you hit tab it completed out to the longest common match in your history. It was awesome for navigating to different parts of sites you visit often.

Chrome should really steal the heuristics that Quicksilver (http://github.com/tiennou/blacktree-alchemy) uses for its auto-completion. After just a few weeks of use, I reached the point where Quicksilver seemed to read my mind. If I type in the three or four most significant characters of what I'm looking for, it'll just show up.

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.

One small thing I like about Safari is that it understands addresses like nytimes/politics as nytimes.com/politics.

I guess that's true. Personally I guess I never noticed because I have Quicksilver indexing my Safari history. I can also use it to do all my Web searches.

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.

I'm not sure how Chrome's treatment of custom search engines differs from Firefox's. In Chrome, you can associate a URL with a keyword so that when you type "keyword query" into the address bar, the %s parameter in the associated URL is replaced with your query. In what way is Firefox's better?

In Firefox, I can type any of the following into the awesome bar:

   "d victual"  -> looks up "victual"
   "j joust"    -> gets "joust" in a Japanese dictionary
   "wp Boron"   -> displays the wikipedia page "Boron"
   "hn patio11" -> displays HN comments of "patio11"

How can I do this in Chrome? Last time I checked, it wasn't possible. If it is now, then I might start using Chrome for more resource intensive flash games.

Go into your search engine manager (via options or the omnibox's context menu) and edit the keywords for your chosen engine - note that we automatically add engines here with the keyword as the domain, so if you do a search on amazon.com, we'll automatically add amazon with the keyword 'amazon.com' - with autocomplete, this lets you type 'am', then press tab to search (or space-separate the keywork from the term).

You can do the same in Chrome. Check under Options ("Basic" tab) > "Manage" next to Default Search. You should see a list of search engines. If you've already used the search engine and Chrome has picked it up, just select it from the list, "Edit", and customize what keyword you want to use (by default it uses the basic URL). If it's not there, "Add" to make a new one.

For example, for Wikipedia I use: Keyword: wp URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&...

Here's the Chrome help page about it: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95... It tells you to use Tab to search, but typing just the keyword and search term works fine (e.g. "wp Google" to look up Google on Wikipedia).

I see from your responses why I couldn't find that-- you're all talking about search engines! I wasn't thinking of HN or bi-lingual dictionaries as search engines and I never even considered managing search engine options rather than just adding a keyword to a bookmark (which Chrome won't let you do).

It's definitely a weird interface and a lot of menus to go through, but once it's set up, it's pretty much the same as FF's search bookmarks. Thanks.

This can also be done in Chrome, see other responses here. What Chrome also does is that it discovers searches by itself, so that when I type "im" and the autocomplete brings up imbd.com I can press tab, my search word and enter. There is no need to manually add the keywords.

They are for anyone using node.js.

It certainly feels faster. It also took less than half the time to run the webkit JS benchmark than my firefox install. 414ms vs 1046ms.

And it also fixed a glitch I was fighting with the Xmarks extension being unable to sync.

So I'm back to Chrome as my default browser.

Things keeping me from using Chrome:

* Lack of built-in RSS support. This one kind of blows my mind.

* Worst progress indicator I've ever seen.

* Can't open external links in new windows, have to open in "tab of whatever my last used browser window was".

* Flash crashes more than it does in Safari/Firefox, but I don't blame Chrome for that.

Not exactly constructive to the conversation I guess, but at least the first three things have been driving me nuts for a bit.

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.

Because Google Gears is dead.

Client-side HTML5 databases have supplanted gears.

Fair enough - so how do I use google docs when I'm offline?

Alternatively, would you have suggestions on some other service that provides similar doc capability with html5 database?

Good question(s), I was just relaying the decision Google made:

http://gearsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/hello-html5.html

Thanks...that makes total sense. I need to (sadly) give google gears the boot.

I don't understand how they are missing the Pagespeed plugin...Available for firefox, but not Chrome, their own browser.

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

Adblock: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj...

Isn't as effective in Chrome as it is in Firefox, last time I used it (couple months ago, probably).

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

You meant http://www.google.com/reader, right? (or one of several online alternatives). Why would anyone want to read their RSS feeds in a single browser on a single machine in 2010? Do people these days really spend all their online time at a single machine?

When a user clicks on a .rss URL in FF the page is rendered in a human-readable format. This aids the user in determining whether or not the feed is worth subscribing to.

Chrome displays it in plaintext. Now you've gotta import it into your reader before you decide if you really even want to subscribe.

You can preview feeds in Google Reader now, without having to add them.

Actually i meant all of the rss reading eyxtension there. I thought some of them are Google Reader integration and some of them are the standard rss-fetching kind.. never tried one of them, though ;)

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.

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!

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but lately Google Chrome just freezes up most times I open a page that has flash. I'm using it on a Mac

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.

The new test system looks amazing! I love when companies do that kind of stuff, it must keep their employees happy!

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

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 :)

Just upgraded and almost immediately had to file a bug report. Flash video will not play in anything but full screen, and getting to said fullscreen requires about mouse clicks in quick succession.

I'm running OS X 10.6.3 on dual quad-core xeon (Nehalem 8 Core) Mac Pro with 6gb ram. Chrome is my default browser, and while I am part of the Youtube Html5 Beta, the inconvenience is rather large. Flash apps are a no-go entirely as they will not render.

Chrome is still missing features that are must have for me from a usability perspective. The number one is "full page default zoom" (eg. not just text zoom). For some reason this request is being ignored since 2008:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=32a8...

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.

Weird, I just upgraded on Linux (from 5.0.342.9 to 5.0.375.29) and fonts on a bunch of sites (like HN) are different now. I wonder what did that.

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/

Any way to tweak the auto-update features for Flash? I want to have the debugger version installed instead, or disable it altogether. :/

I still miss bookmark tagging from FF. In fact, I often keep a FF window open just so I can keep my bookmarks organized with tags.

What I dislike in chrome is that passwords are not secured by a SSO password like in firefox. What I like in chrome is its thin and lightweight frame.

What I miss in Chrome and Firefox is bookmark synchronization on my own server because privacy is important to me.

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.

Just installed and tried on Win XP. It definitely feels faster than Safari and Firefox.

More good news: pinned tabs are back.

I still prefer Opera, the speed of Chrome, the functionality that Firefox has to copy.

The speed and subtlety of nose-picking is also fantastic (at 0:09 mark)

What kind of specific improvements are they making to the JavaScript engine that is leading to such dramatic speed increases?

does it have firebug yet? That's all I care about. And no, the development toolbar is not good enough

Works in any browser:

http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite

Last time I tried firebuglite, it didn't really work in any browser.

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

You, my friend, clearly don't use Firebug that much. Until you can add new attributes to existing selectors in developer tools, it simply cannot compare

You can also do that with Chrome's builtin inspector.

How? It doesn't seem to work like Firebug does where I can just double click and new attributes...

Double click to edit any existing attribute; move cursor after semicolon; type new attribute; press Enter.

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