Monday, March 01, 2010

Problems with Google Chrome

Since Google Chrome came out, I have been using it as my main browser. I like its clean interface which to me is a bit more appealing than FireFox, and its fast loading which beats Microsoft's IE 8. Quite strange that in a recent survey it came out that in the UK the Google Chrome browser only has a share of 5%. But there may be reasons for this, as I too have some issues with this browser which have yet prevented me from making it my default browser: I still have MS IE 8 and Firefox on my computers, just in case something does not appear right. And one thing seems to be the handling of JavaScript.

One example: When I checked on Spiegel Online the Medal Statistics of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the table appeared to be faulty in Google Chrome: instead of country names there was only "undefined", and the flags were empty rectangles. When looking at the same page in MS IE8, everything was shown correctly. What could be the reason for this? I have no idea... Gears is installed properly, the browser version is 4.0.249.89, up-to-date. Unfortunately the user interface sleekness of Google Chrome has the disadvantage that there are no settings for me to control: I did not find anywhere to "enable Javascript" or something similar...

Another strange thing: I wrote some HTML code for a few web pages with images, and I used the "alt" attribute there, to give an alternative textual description of the image. In all browsers this "alt" attribute is shown when hovering with the mouse over the image, like a tooltip. Not so in Google Chrome: nothing appears. This may be actually closer to the intended web standard use, which recommends to employ the "title" attribute for tooltip-like information... I may have to change my web pages to properly take care of this.

2 comments:

Falk said...

i used chrome for some time myself and can confirm the lightness of the browser...
however i had problems with some flash content and found the whole javascript thing similarly annoying.

but the most important thing is that there seem to be problems or concerns about privacy and the amount of data chrome collects and sends to google.

another interesting thing:
i installed the opera browser and really liked it but it had problems with flash content too. all the features though are very nice and make multitab surfing a delight. and it is very fast too.

i decided to uninstall chrome as i suspected it to interfere with opera (which i initially installed after chrome) et voila, opera works fine even with flash content...

currently still using firefox as main but i might well change to opera soon.

give it a try...

Reinhold Behringer said...

Last time I checked Opera, it cost something - and this prevented me from using it. I am going to try it now.

Regarding privacy: yes, Google collects a lot of data... but who can confirm that the other browsers really do not do the same?