nearby.org.uk blog

Sort of following on from Ten things I don’t like about Google Chrome, and inspired by the comments in Tabbed Browsing in Google Chrome, below are my biggest annoyances with Google Chrome (otherwise a worthy browser), in rough ‘annoyance’ order

1. No Page title – other than the truncated one in the tab, or a tooltip. Makes using forums a pain – I have a terrible memory, have to think hard what the thread title is in many cases. A quote from a chrome developer(?) pkasting: We think page titles are generally not very useful, which is why we’ve demoted them in our UI so much. The added information doesn’t seem worth the space lost to display a full title somewhere. All I can say is Ugg! I have a bookmarklet that mostly adds it back – have to remember to click it, and ti doesnt work well with Gmail etc. Hopefully extensions, aka greasemonkly clone, will help with this… [On geograph forum its was this lack of contaxt that prompted me to add the page title and current forum just above the post reply box - again to prevent having to scroll to the top ot find it]
2. Tab ordering. Chrome uses a special system for desiding where to open new tabs. Admittly it works well in many cases, but its still very annoying that its not easily deterministic – so sometimes have to go hunting for that tab just opened. Its not next to the current tab (if opened multiple)0, and its not at the end, its somewhere in the middle of nowhere! I dont think at the end of the tab list is ideal, but its a better comprimise (IMHO of course) than the current system. 
3. Truncated ‘status bar’.  When hovering over a link it shows a preview of the link – a very useful feature. (the only reason have the status bar on in other browsers. But it shortens the URL in many cases – putting in … . I have a wide enough screen, why not show me the whole thing! (of course still truncate if it wont fit on screen. 
4. Minimal ‘Page Info’ dialog. It would be so much nicer if the dialog included the url and page title. Particully useful for ‘View frame info’ The icing on the cake would the http headers, and sometimes the media tab (from firefox) comes in handy.