Zentrope

chroma chroma bing bing

I’ve been using Chrome again, lately. The dev builds. There are a lot of things I like about the browser:

• The tab animation, and how all new pages start in a tab. You can almost get that with Safari by tweaking a hidden setting, but not quite,

• Being able to type search terms directly into the main location bar, rather than in a separate search bar.

Some missing things:

• Can’t drag a URL from the location bar to the desktop. I sometimes do this for a temporary link I want to get back to right way. Having it on my desktop is a big reminder.

• Annoyed by site icons next to bookmarks. I’d like an option to remove them. Why? Because all those colors and pictures are distracting. I like the way Safari removes them from the bookmark bar, but keeps them in bookmark folders.

• PDF viewing. I really, really like the way Safari embeds Preview.app in the browser window when you click on a PDF. You then have the option of downloading it. This is especially helpful for docs that can’t be shared over the net. Chrome’s plugin for viewing PDFs via a Google Doc reader doesn’t cut it in those situations.

There’s quite a way to go with Mac integration, is what I’m saying. But it’s still pretty good, as is. Fast, lightweight, minimalist UI, and WebKit.

And just for fun, I switched my default search engine to Bing. It’s not bad for casual searching. I love their wrapper around Wikipedia sites, for instance.

I’ve not used the Bing search engine for development work (searching for obscure Java exception messages, say, or for issues regarding obscure third-party libraries), so I’ll have to test that and see. I have a feeling that Google is still way better on that score, but it doesn’t hurt to branch out once in a while, even if to discover once again the greatness of Google’s achievement.