Apart from the logo and the name, everything else related to Chrome is almost monochrome, typical Google minimalistic design. Even GMail and GTalk have colorful logos and the rest black and white and a cool shade of blue for the bare minimum borders and bars. The immense power, speed, and security that Google promises behind this plain look should make it the best of all browsers.
Also because it is a product by Google.
However, I could not refrain myself from finding faults since the day Chrome was launched. Without going into the gory details, let me list down the features I missed badly:
1. The Chrome omnibar Google is so proud of, is less powerful than the Firefox 3 'Awesome bar'. [The omnibar learns as you use the browser; it can transform itself into the search bar of various sites you search on frequently, the following limitations still exist.]
a. In Firefox 3 address bar, type in a term and the autocomplete function shows in a dropdown all possible matching sites from your browsing history, bookmarks and tags. On the other hand, the Chrome omnibar only automatically suggests related queries and popular websites, or if your input string occurs in the url of a page you had already visited.
b. It also does not go to the most likely page, the I-am-feeling-lucky feature I am so used to in Firefox 3. (For example, you could type in "firefox features" in the address bar and it would take you to the features page on the official Mozilla website).
2. Does not let you perform a text-search inside text areas occuring on a page. Also, the absence of a toolbar doesn't let you search on pages where Ctrl+F is mapped to something else, like in the new Yahoo! mail.
3. Lets you move only one by one between your last viewed pages using the back and forward buttons, unlike FF3 where the back/forward buttons give you a dropdown to directly jump to any of your previously viewed pages. [Lets you move between last viewed pages by right-clicking or click-and-holding on the back/forward buttons. Not intuitive though.]
4. There is no 'Open' option for attachments, it saves them directly to the designated downloads folder, rather than the temporary windows folder. Also, there is no progress bar for a downloading file.
5. The status bar is temporary and not wide enough. You might not be able to view the complete url when you hover over a link.
6. Zoom in and out works only for the text as opposed to the entire page as in Firefox.
7. The powerful Javascript support does not work for some features for some applications. The place it irks the most was Google's very own GMail, where the alerts do not have the default button selected, so they cannot be operated using the spacebar.
8. Chrome doesn't ask you to save tabs when you exit, and therefore they are lost if you accidentally close the browser.
I believe the above list would still expand. Yes, you could write your own or hunt for addons that provide some of the above missing features and make up for some of them.
Google Chrome, however, is not an utter waste. There are quite a few very useful and interesting features:
0. The omnibar learns as you use the browser; it can transform itself into the search bar of various sites you search on frequently. Or you could configure your omnibar to search on specific sites.
1. It is no doubt faster, even though I felt multiple processes instead of threads for various tabs would reduce performance. Multiple processes, however, seem to be effective in a lot of other problem areas, like security and browser crashes. More details in the Google comic book: Google Chrome: Behind the Open Source Browser Project.
2. Chrome persists data you write in a text area. So if you were typing something in a text area and the browser crashes, you do not lose it. Also, you can expand any text area on any page to any dimension you want to.
3. The smart 'new' tab lists your most frequently used, recently closed, and bookmarked pages. The simplistic look without any toolbars makes sure all tools appear as if they are a part of the webpage.
4. The history is much more exhaustive than in any other browser I've seen. It gives you a minute-by-minute history of every day in a full page rather than in the constricted sidebar. Also, you have the power of Google search within your history: search for any word in the text of the pages you previously visited and you get the pages instantaneously.
5. The task manager that manages different tabs comes handy in the case of a single page crashing/hanging, and also for identifying the high resource-intensive tabs.
6. The minimalistic UI gives you much more space on the page as opposed to other browsers that eat up lot of vertical pixels through their toolbars and stuff.
7. Incognito mode (no trace of visited pages on your machine), application shortcuts (direct shortcuts to desktop like applications without any tabs/address bar), better javascript support by means of a new Javascript Virtual Machine, the Inspect Element, are a few other features of Chrome.
Chrome is being talked about as Google's competition to Microsoft, though I believe it is difficult to wean Internet Explorer loyalists as they are the non-so-tech-savvy ones content with the OS in-built browser. Chrome is built on Apple's WebKit framework, the same used by their Safari, but Apple fans are generally very loyal. Mozilla Firefox is one browser that might feel the heat, if not now, in due course of time.
Out and out, I have mixed feelings for Google's new browser. While the look-and-feel and speed are things I like, it is difficult to un-learn stuff from Firefox. Let me see if I can write some good enough addons for Chrome.
That's how the Apple India homepage looks. They could rewrite it as: "The phone you've been waiting for a year. Keep waiting. Or smuggle one from North America or Europe and have it unlocked." The homepage on the global site apple.com reads: "iPhone 3G. Twice as fast. Half the price. Coming July 11."
While I am (and other Indians are) eagerly waiting for the iPhone, and love it already even before we know when would it be officially launched in India, there is an entire community of iPhone haters out there. A majority of these haters are feminists, and someone might just sue Apple for being misogynistic.
A very important feature of the iphone, the multi-touch screen, allows sliding to scroll, pinching/unpinching to zoom, and whisking/dragging to flick/flip, apart from all other operations working by touch. But many women with long fingernails find it difficult to use the virtual QWERTY keyboard to type text. iPhone loves skin and does not work with fingernails and hence it becomes technically infeasible for people with long fingernails to provide bare skin for contact with a small key on the screen.
iPhone does not come with a stylus; it is not designed to have one, it responds to electrical charge emitted by fingertips. However, few
companies like Ten One Design claim to have come up with aftermarket iPhone styli even though it disturbs the very essence of the smart phone. In the past, Apple has said that it is more natural to use the pointing device you are born with: the finger.
There is another set of companies that manufacture phone fingers to keep your touch screens smudge-free. These phone fingers are made out of very thin latex, and have obvious sexual uses, and can go as another component in the misogynous claims against the manufacturers of iPhone, even though they do not produce or encourage the use of any such protective sheaths.
Long-nailed ladies have been complaining of this on several forums on the web, including one on Apple's own site, but there are few who are compromising enough to have their fingernails trimmed or use the side of their fingers, whereas there are some who do not have any problems even when they have French manicures.
I've already registered for an iPhone. Let me see when do I get my hands fingernails onto it.
I have always found sleeping a waste of time. My parents find my nocturnal tendencies pretty normal now and get worried if I go to bed before the wee hours of the morning. I have this bad habit of stretching myself in many things, sleep being no exception—my average slumber on weekdays turns out to be little over 5 hours, and on the weekends to 7 hours. I try to be up with my computer on the lap till I literally fall asleep. Oftentimes my friends on the opposite side of the globe suddenly find themselves talking to a non-respondent, snoring ashes, oblivious of the repeated BUZZ!es on the IM window in the middle of a conversation; the clock might say fivish in the morning then.
I have always wished I could stay up longer utilizing time, though I am never able to make proper use of it; I would rather keep awake and waste time reading irrelevant stuff over the internet or chat about trivial issues or simply surf channels on the television or check my emails several times, but nevertheless, that’s not the point. The essence is I want to waste as less time on sleep as possible. Maybe if I know I would not fall asleep, I’d be able to plan out and execute things in a better fashion.
I had often wished there was some alternative to sleep, a pill or something. A recent study by Darpa-funded scientists at UCLA has made my dream come true. The research advocates a naturally occurring brain hormone Orexin A to be a promising candidate to become a sleep-replacement drug. This peptide could be used in a nasal spray, as it was used in the relatively benign study on primates, which reversed the effects of sleep deprivation, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests.
Such a product could be widely desired by millions of people across the world who feel twenty-four hours a bit too less to do all that they want to. People would use it to work or party longer, or to increase alertness wherever and whenever needed. Students could work and study and enjoy, reducing the inactive time in bed. Working mothers can do full justice to their children and work. Children could stuff going to school and completing their homework and playing—all in a day without the loss of any one of them.
On a larger scale, countries legalizing this drug may develop into faster-rising economies than the ones prohibiting its use, for the simple reason their people would be able to work longer hours. Salaries would plunge because of instant doubling of manpower. Securities can keep round-the-clock vigil with less number of shifts and much lesser risk. Well, there can be several unpredictable uses that can change the world around us.
However, I am not very optimistic about the drug hitting the shelves very soon. I believe it is still “miles to go before I don’t sleep”. For one, some other counter-research might find not sleeping resulting in cardiovascular or metabolic disorders, or worse, impotency and infertility, as half of the studies on half of your daily actions reveal. Second, any commercial treatment using Orexin A would need approval from the FDA, which can take several years.
Till then I can only use caffeine and lose sleep dreaming about an anti-sleeping-pill.
