Tag: ‘google’ · TangleBones

Background Tab Strangeness

In the past I’ve noticed some strange behaviors in WebKit based browsers, especially when opening tabs in the background. For instance, sometimes if a page contains an embedded YouTube video (or the like), Safari on the Mac won’t load the video unless you go to the tab and reload the whole page. Frustrating, but no big deal.

I was willing to chalk that up to the ever-crappy Mac version of the Adobe Flash plugin (so slow, Adobe! Why do you hate us?), but then I opened a link to this nifty new Javascript-based graphing library in a background tab in Google Chrome and when I clicked over got this:

(It’s a little tricky to see, but a bunch of the graph’s labels are way off to the left.)

Now, Safari on Windows doesn’t have this problem, and I’m not sure if that’s because it’s an issue with a particular snapshot of WebKit, or something Google did in implementing their custom Javascript engine V8. Either way, that sucks.

Challenges for Google Chrome on the Mac

Chrome has been getting a lot of attention (well, from me anyway) and it’s well-deserved. Many Apple fans - like me - are excited about the idea of Google’s fancy new browser coming to the Mac.

But my absolute favorite feature of Chrome isn’t something that will translate as well on the Mac. Chrome, when maximized, places your tabs all the way at the top of the screen, which makes clicking them much easier. Fitt’s law tells us that “the time [and effort] required to rapidly move to a target area [is] a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.” Mouse targets that are against the edge of the screen are much easier to hit because you don’t have to aim nearly as precisely. User interface experts like to say that buttons at the top of the screen are infinitely tall. Icons in the corners - like the Start button or the close window button of a maximized window on a Windows computer - are infinitely wide and tall - they require almost no effort to target.

Which brings us back to Chrome. When maximized - the usual way of running browsers on Windows computers - its tabs are much easier to click than those of any other browser because you only really have to aim left or right. Since changing tabs is one of the most fundamental parts of browsing in a tabbed browser, about the only thing Google could do to make the experience even better would be to place the back button all the way in the top left corner since that’s the most commonly used interface element in a browser.

But this doesn’t translate to the Mac at all. On the Mac, almost nothing runs maximized. More importantly, because Apple’s interface designers recognize the importance of Fitt’s law, the top edge of the screen is reserved for the menu bar. Even placing the tabs at the left, right or bottom of the screen doesn’t work since people are likely to have their dock in one of those places.

Chrome introduces a lot of other interesting new features to web browsing, especially under the hood, but for me the “tabs at the top” is its best feature. Now that extensions are supposedly in Google’s plans and proxies allow you to block ads in Chrome, many of my reservations about using it are disappearing. So how will convert me on the Mac? What sort of answers will they come up with for the interface improvements on my platform of choice?

Chrome is Nice, But Beta

I’m really liking Google Chrome, the new browser for Windows (Mac and Linux someday!) from everyone’s favorite Internet stock. Of course, like any Google product it’s a beta release, and likely to stay that way for the next 4-5 years. But somehow I feel like there may be some things that are too beta.

When you view a feed in most modern browsers, you either get a code-highlighted version of the XML or a nice XSLT-modified view of the feed as a web page. Google Chrome gives you this:

Which isn’t terribly helpful. By comparison, the browser whose engine they used for their rendering code, Safari, gives you this:

Which is only about a million times nicer. 

Still, Chrome is pretty nice, all things considered. It may not be faster than Firefox,  but it feels like it is because it isn’t loaded down with add-ons. Of course, that’s the other problem: no way to extend the browser means no ad-blocking. And I don’t imagine that Google plans on putting out a product that blocks their major revenue stream. So I’ll inevitably be switching back to Firefox. Again.

Update: Also insufferable: the built-in dictionary doesn’t seem to have any way to add new words, so my name will always be red-underlined until they fix that. Sigh.