Well, we’re into day three and a half of the Chrome experience. And as the initial excitement dies down, we’re starting to notice a few niggles – plus some nice little features that aren’t immediately obvious.

Thankfully, most of our problems are minor bugs, which will hopefully be fixed in short order, either by Google or by website developers. For example, the button for switching between the old and new Facebook interfaces doesn’t currently work in Chrome. And despite its multi-process cleverness, the whole thing grinds to a halt when it tries to launch Adobe Reader (though in fairness, what doesn’t?).

Any colour you like, so long as it’s blue

We’ve a few reservations about the interface, too. On this week’s podcast, you’ll have heard our esteemed editor describe it as “a bit Fisher Price”, and I agree that the blue title bar is a little wishy-washy for my taste. It looks a lot better in Vista (now there’s a sentence I never expected to type). 

And regardless of whether your title bar is transparent or blue, it’s too damn thin. It’s a pain to move the window about, and if you double-click to maximise it there’s only a tiny area where you can double-click to un-maximise it again. It doesn’t even show the title of the current page, so with Chrome I normally only see the first eight characters of each page’s title. Not helpful.

It’s not where you’ve been, it’s where you’re at

I’ll go out on a limb and say the “favourite sites” grid that appears when you open a new tab is flawed too. The theory’s sound enough – who doesn’t like their favourite sites? But in my case, four of the nine thumbnails are pages within the PC Pro website, which is clearly not the most useful arrangement.

And at home, I don’t necessarily want anybody who opens a new tab to see a thumbnail of my most recent visit to illicit-encounters.com.* A simple “always show this site/never show this site” setting would make a big difference.

Baby, remember my name

One final objection is that we all keep coming in to the office and absent-mindedly starting Firefox instead of Chrome. All right, that’s not really Google’s fault, but there’s something very forgettable about the Chrome icon – not to mention its name, compared to the vivid imagery of “Firefox”.**

Still, as ace reporter Stuart Turton commented this morning: “I keep launching Firefox, then immediately realising I meant to launch Chrome. And the scary thing is that then I hit Chrome, and I’m still up and running before Firefox has even appeared.”

The wonder of about

On the upside, we’ve grown fond of a few of Chrome’s less-publicised features. The Task Manager is great as it is, but click on “Stats for nerds” (or type “about:memory” into the address bar) and you’ll get a whole page of RAM usage statistics, broken down to a degree of techie detail that even David Fearon would probably consider a bit much.

You can get at other information via the “about:” URI, too. Typing “about:version”, for example, will show which version of Chrome you’re on, while “about:network” lets you monitor various aspects of Chrome’s network connection.

“About:stats” will expose more than you ever wanted to know about Chrome’s internal registers – or, if you prefer your inscrutable data in graph form, simply enter “about:histograms”.

Other possibilities include “about:dns”, which tells you how much time Chrome reckons it’s saved you by prefetching DNS records – it can add up to minutes over the course of a day. “About:plugins”, meanwhile, shows you how many plugins are integrated into Chrome. Prepare to be impressed: we found a lot more third-party features working than we’d expected.

There’s a joke in there too: visiting “about:internets” might raise a smile for more geeky users. It’s funnier than typing “about:mozilla” into a Mozilla based browser, anyway. And if you’re dying to see the infamous “sad tab”, you can cause one simply by entering “about:crash”.

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* Joke. But you see my point.
** A brief office poll concludes that if we were launching a competitor to Firefox, we’d choose a name that suggested a similar combination of elemental and animal power. We thought maybe “Airwolf.”