Outside the Beltway

Google Chrome Bleg

James Joyner
18

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I gave Google’s Chrome browser a go the first few days after its debut but found it rather annoying and went back to Firefox.  The latter has gotten so balky of late, however, that I’ve followed Alex Knapp’s suggestion and given Chrome another chance.

For the most part, it’s fine.  I’m not having the crashing issues that I was with Firefox and the minor annoyance of menu commants being nonexistent or not where I’m used to them are somethng I can live with.

But I’ve having some issues with the WordPress and Drupal interfaces of the various blogs I run.

In WordPress, embedded photos don’t show up in the WYSIWYG editor, which I use interchangably with the HTML editor.  Also, especially on my home computer, it quite frequently saves published posts back in draft mode and eats various edits, especially tagging.

In Drupal, it works well enough but doesn’t render pages on the backend very cleanly.  Annoying but livable.

Anyone else experiencing these problems?  Any suggestions aside from “Buy a Mac!” or “Use Linux!” that might alleviate them?  I’m running Windows XP on rather robust machines with dual monitor setups in all cases, if that matters.

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18 responses to “Google Chrome Bleg”

  1. E.D. Kain Avatar
    E.D. Kain

    You could always try out Opera. I haven’t used it in a while but I remember it being pretty good. I might even give it another go since both Chrome and Firefox are annoying me lately.

  2. odograph Avatar
    odograph

    It says Chrome Bleg, but I don’t see a specific question … I’ve been using Chrome as my primary for a while. I like the clean interface. I use it with wordpress … shrug.

  3. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    @odograph: Two questions, although perhaps not all that specific:

    Anyone else experiencing these problems? Any suggestions aside from “Buy a Mac!” or “Use Linux!” that might alleviate them?

  4. DC Loser Avatar
    DC Loser

    Or how about trying out Apple’s Safari for Windows? I haven’t used it on Windows, but find it is very fast on the native Mac.

  5. anjin-san Avatar
    anjin-san

    Firefox seems to crash constantly now. I have been using Chrome since its release, for the most part it is stable and very fast.

  6. sam Avatar
    sam

    @ED

    You could always try out Opera. I haven’t used it in a while but I remember it being pretty good.

    I’ll second that. My experience with it on both Windoze and Linux boxes is that it’s a lot faster on each. Plus, on the Linux side, I can pretty much turn stuff on or off at will, e.g., plugins (Flash). I think it looks cleaner than FF, too — but YMMV.

  7. Bill Avatar
    Bill

    Capitalist conspiracy theory alert: I downloaded Chrome to give it a look. Didn’t take to it.

    As soon I went back to FF, it began constantly crashing, a problem I’d never had before. This is especially and specifically true when I do things quickly in gmail.

    The tin-foil hat version is that programmers build conflicts into new software that make competing software function like crap. The more likely version is that once you install a new competing software, it causes unforeseen conflicts that destabilize the system.

    Not knowing dick about computer science, I have no idea. But I am fairly certain that I would not be having problems with FF if I never would have bothered with Chrome, the timing and consequences being so exquisitely dramatic.

  8. Trumwill Avatar
    Trumwill

    To follow up on someone else’s suggestion, Safari for Windows is pretty cool, but is not necessarily compatible with WordPress (the buttons don’t seem to show up).

    I was getting close to giving up on Firefox, but I’ve been having better luck as of late. Also, loathe as I am to admit it, Internet Explorer 8 is actually a pretty decent browser these days.

  9. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    Turn off all add-ons, then add them back in one at a time until you find which one is causing the problem. Do the same for plugins. 99% of problems I’ve encountered with Firefox has been from add-ons and plugins.

  10. Jim Henley Avatar
    Jim Henley

    James, I won’t tell you to buy a Mac. I will tell you to download Windows Live Writer, the sweetest blogging software ever. It’s free and fabulous.

  11. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    @Jim: I should give it another whirl. I downloaded it some time back on your advice but never got into it because I found it harder to insert images, title tags, and whatnot than in WP. But it may just take so getting used to.

  12. sam Avatar
    sam

    Speaking of plugins. I’m sure all of us are cookie-conscious. I have Opera set to delete all cookies when I shut it down. But did you know that cookies can be layed down on your system whenever you run Flash (like say a YouTube)? And, at least on Linux boxes, not in the browser folder? These cookies persist, too, for a long time. On my Linux box, these were set in the ~/.macromedia folder. I just deleted that folder and linked the new ~/.macromedia to /dev/null. Dunno what you would do on a Windows box, but, if you’ve got cookie paranoia, you might want to find out.

  13. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    @sam:
    Thanks, I had no idea that Flash Player was keeping stuff outside of ~/.mozilla, and your solution is perfect. Maybe it’s time to give Gnash another try.

    For Windows users, Flash keeps it’s goods in “%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player”.

  14. sam Avatar
    sam

    Yeah, I used to be able to do the /dev/null trick with the cookies4.dat itself in the Opera folder. But now Opera rewrites the file each time I try. The bastards.

  15. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    you can always make a tmpfs mount for that file (or use an existing one like /var/run), so when you shut down it gets lost. I’m assuming it will only delete and recreate it if it can’t write to the file, so this should work.

  16. Brett Avatar
    Brett

    Chrome was faster – when it worked. It had a tendency to “stall out” occasionally when loading a page that made it annoying, and it had some issues with video players that I had.

  17. sam Avatar
    sam

    @Michael

    you can always make a tmpfs mount for that file (or use an existing one like /var/run), so when you shut down it gets lost. I’m assuming it will only delete and recreate it if it can’t write to the file, so this should work.

    Kewlness. I’ll give that a try. Thanks

  18. sam Avatar
    sam

    For Michael

    Well, none of that worked. But I’ve done something that seems to, and I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you what it’s so simple–I made the cookies4.dat read-only. Opera seems fine with this (so far…). When I open the cookie manager, there they are, but the cookie file is not growing. BTW, FF doesn’t like the /dev/null trick, either. Haven’t tried the read-only thing. FF’s cookie file (3.0 >)
    is cookies.sqlite.

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