Not Stainless Steel

It's been a long, long time since my last blog post. Apologies for that, I've been real busy with work. For those of you that don't know, last year I took up an offer with Sourcebits to help create tasty things. At the same time I also made the dive and switched from Fireworks to Photoshop for the vast majority of my work. A lot of things have happened in the past year, some good, some great, some terrible. I won't bore you all with that.

Instead I'm going to bore you about lots of other things.

First up, Chrome and Safari. Those that pay any attention to my Twitter account know a few months back I switched to Chrome as my main browser. Just like any, it's got good and bad points. I thought I'd go through them. I'll start with the biggest problems first. Chrome is not made for heavy browsing on OS X. The design decisions made make this evident. There's no scrolling tabs or "view the rest of your tabs" element, like in Firefox or Safari. If you open three dozen tabs in a Chrome window you're instead greeting with a mess of ridges that are supposed to be tabs, but that would look more at home on the back of a dinosaur.

That's not even the worst of it. Due to the fact Chrome separates processes for plugins and such, you soon have dozens of "Chrome Helpers". Now that wouldn't be a terrible thing - I for one love the fact Chrome is practically uncrashable from plugins. However, I don't like it when it means I can't launch anymore applications. That's right, if you open up enough tabs in Chrome, you can't open other applications on your Mac. Finder will return an error and you'll be forced to close Chrome tabs.

Not just that, but when you hit that limit Chrome will no longer load new tabs. They'll just sit there with the async progress spinning and do nothing. That's insane and one of the largest reasons why Chrome isn't ready yet - if I enjoy it and use it too much, it breaks. Craziness. It's not all bad though. Chrome is very fast, loads pages quickly, has extensions and lots of neat little things. One of my favourite is being able to just being able to type "wiki", hit tab, then type my query. It works on other sites too, like Wowhead.

Another pet peeve is the download system. Having notifications at the bottom for download progress is neat. Forcing me to close them all the time isn't. I understand they wanted to do something different from the usual download window, but it doesn't work well. And if you're downloading or saving things from multiple windows? Well the bottom bars are window specific, so you'll have to close each. All in all it's just a messy system.

So overall? Chrome is good but has some damning flaws. I'll be heading back to Safari as my main browser. I think that blurb'll be it for today, I'll try to post at least semi-regularly from now on. At the very least the next post will be about icons and things. Maybe.