Awesome Captain America Trailer

plus new movie poster!

Chrome 12: To Chrome or not to Chrome?

With all the technological advancement of Chrome over other web browsers in the wild and already available in its previous incarnations, I still prefer Apple’s Safari as my default web browser.  Simply, because the amount of resource it gobbles is much less.  Though through time, Safari does freeze up even after you’ve already added physical memory to your rig.  This can be mitigated by a simple close and reopen which can be annoying.  But what’s more annoying is that some of the websites I usually go to doesn’t support Safari.  I’ve installed “Multibrowser” to make things easier with incompatible websites but this have introduced additional mouse clicks in navigating web links especially using other applications like Reeder, Sparrow, Twitter and others.  I’m surprised that Chrome has more compatibility with web sites even though… as far as I know, Safari came first.

I’m glad I checked my Reeder (my default RSS reader) a few weeks back because had I not… I wouldn’t have known Google released an update to its Chrome web browser.  I have Chrome since its release in my application folder but never bothered to use it because of stability issues.  Comparing the PC version to its Mac incarnation, the latter was a big disappointment.  But I kept the auto-update feature open, hoping for the day it matures on a Mac.  Seeing the version 12 tag got me somehow excited… Will this be it?  Is Chrome finally tamed and ready to play nice with Mac OSX?

Surprise!

Chrome in terms of speed outpaces Safari, but not that much [I didn’t use a benchmarking tool :)].  The thing that would make me choose one from the other is stability and surprisingly, Chrome 12 is a much stable version than its predecessors.   Everything seems to be in place except, I guess as a result of the silent rift between Apple and Google and for the fact Google is developing it’s own web video codec, Chrome dropped support for H.264.      

Goodies  = Extensions

I wasn’t a fan of “extensions” when Firefox introduced them.  But with the resource hog crazy flash animation in most websites, I was forced to use extensions like “ClickToFlash” and “FlashToHTML5” for Safari.  So, just after checking out Chrome 12, I checked out their collection of extensions and was happy I found my usual extensions equivalent and found some new nifty ones.

Neat Bookmarks

There are three ways of accessing bookmarks in Chrome:

1.  Clicking on the “wrench” icon and then “bookmarks.”  [mouse/trackpad dependent action]

2.  Enable the option to “always show the bookmarks bar” in Chrome preferences.  Click the wrench icon and then “preferences.” [mouse/trackpad dependent action]

3.  Press “Option + ⌘ + B” to access the “Bookmark Manager.” [keyboard action]

Neat Bookmarks is an extension that sits in your toolbar and provides a drop down menu listing of your bookmarks with just a click.  Though mouse/trackpad dependent, this extension saves space in viewing websites since you won’t need to enable option 2 above.  And one overlooked feature of Chrome regarding bookmarks is that every time you create a new tab, it shows your bookmarks bar and disappears when you have clicked/opened a website.

Scroll To Top Button

I first saw this type of button in Tumblr and immediately installed it in Chrome upon seeing the extension in its web store.  An improvement over Tumblr’s button is the ability to also quickly navigate to the bottom part of the sites you’re viewing.  With this extension, your mouse click wheel gets its much-deserved rest and no more banging on your left mouse button to scroll up or down.  

Smooth Gestures

This is the neatest browser mouse gesture I have ever used.  Comparing it with Safari’s extension, Smooth Gestures have a plugin that would retain the function of your right mouse button for contextual menus and still use the extension.

Downside

There is no doubt that Chrome is now useable on a Mac.  A lingering issue I have since its early versions is with DNS pre-fetching and I’d turn this on and off from time to time.  Some Facebook games tend to perform poorly but when accessed through their main site turned out to perform way better which made me think of closing my Facebook account :).  Lastly, there’s no extension for downloading YouTube videos. 

Verdict

I liked that its full screen mode is built-in and its ability to sync bookmarks with other browsers do work.  After weeks of using Chrome 12, with nice extensions and better handling of memory, I’ve set Chrome as my primary web browser (as of this posting, Chrome 13 has been released).  The question now is… for how long would I use Chrome as my primary web browser?  With Apple set to release Mac OSX Lion (10.7) next month or several days from now, there will also be a new version of Apple’s Safari with features/function more like Chrome.  I just hope Apple will make it available also for late adopters like me who’ve decided to stick with Snow Leopard as long as I can… or else, I’ll be sticking with Chrome for good.