Boy, remember the good old days when Firefox was an awesome browser? Yeah, me neither, but lately it just sucks more and more all the time. Seems like once every couple of weeks on my install javascript just stops working for no apparent reason, which causes practically every website I visit to lose at least some element of critical functionality, and then it comes back to life a few days later as magically as it vanished. So whenever that happens, I find myself trying to use Safari as a fallback. But Safari sucks even more than Firefox, plus I have Firefox all tricked out with extensions and stuff, which Safari doesn’t do, so there’s another whole level of stuff that doesn’t work.
Back around Christmas, Google finally went ahead and made a beta version of Chrome available for Mac OS. But they call that shit “beta” for a reason, and quite frankly it was pretty weak sauce. The most egregious problem was a complete inability to import and manage bookmarks, but it also suffered from not being able to make use of the extensions that were already available on the Windows version of Chrome. I spent a couple of frustrating days with it, as apparently a bunch of other Mac users did, too, because before long there were articles on tech websites about the problems and a promise from Google to have all the worst kinks ironed out sometime in early 2010.
So, when Firefox predictably went south on me again this weekend, I decided to have another look at Chrome. They have indeed updated it, added the bookmark management, enabled extensions, and generally taken it from unusable to usable. There are some notable no-shows at the extensions table that will leave some gaps for my browsing experience: no in-browser FTP client like FireFTP, no inline media downloader like Down Them All, no Flash downloader like FlashGot, and no Greasemonkey (although I did just find this Lfiehacker post that says Chrome supports Greasemonkey scripts natively…I’ll have to test that out). In other words, there’s still a lot more sizzle than steak about Chrome. BUT AT LEAST THE FRICKIN’ JAVASCRIPT WORKS RELIABLY, MOZILLA!
I abandoned FF a couple weeks ago in favor of Chrome, (PC) but soon discovered what you did… plus NO RSS feeds. Have to get a plug-in to “auto-detect” the RSS on a blog.
Think HTML 5 is the one true answer?
Well, what I really think is that Google needs to stop pedaling half-ready “beta” software and that the fanboys need to put their drooling tongues back in their heads every time Google shits out another “game changer”. HTML 5 addresses the advances in the Web in the last 10 years, but the browsers have to move along, too. If Microsoft could make IE 8 halfway decent, there’s no excuse for Firefox to suck so much, and Google needs to be smacked upside the head for the half-assed status of Chrome.