Giedrius Majauskas blog

Chrome beta aka google browser issues

Ok, it wont be full chrome review as I expect a lot of these in the net for today. I am planing listing some things that I like or bugs I have faced.

Good things:

It is fast. Faster than Firefox with firebug atleast, and the resource management is much much better.

I like the clean interface too, and browsing history is made well. Of couse, you might hate it if you browse strange websites

Tabs on top - I need to get used to it. Somehow i tend to close whole browser instead one tab, but that will be ok when I get used to it. Confirmation screen for closing browser would be nice though.

Also, it does not need firebug - it has its own dom inspector which is quite powerfull. This will make some webdevelopers move from firebug to google chrome, as it requires FAR less resources.

Bad things:

There are few visual bugs in Google chrome, not too much and far less than in I.E. 6 on non-IE6-optimized website. As an examples, www.zynios.lt - some symbols in menu are pushed downwards due to strange handling of relative positioning. Also, font resizing is not as good as on IE 7, but quite comparable with firefox.

The biggest bug so far is how Chrome handles urls in forms with no url specified. As an example, lets take a semi-real url : http://blablablabla.com/admin/index.php/moderation/listing . The url is composed for MVC framework,  with index.php working as dispatcher and arguments separated by /

The form is declared with action=”" and mode is post. In most other browsers, you will be forwared to original URL after submition. So, whats different with google browser ? I get forwarded to http://blablablabla.com/admin instead. That is incorrect behavior in some cases, especially in MVC environment. The form submition has to be handled by specific controler, and generic dispacher knows nothing about handling it. Probably it is caused by cleaning “get” variables from url.  Which is not expected behavior.

Another, smaller bug is handling of HTTP Authorization. We have a site under Http auth which is distributed through 2 subdomains. Lets call one www, and other img. Second subdomain serveres images only and has same login/password for accessing it as first one. So while accessing the page I would need authorize twice, right? Well, not with google chrome - I will have authorize for each image on first page load. Apparently, it does no sinchronizing autorization data after first image is authorized. Annoying minor bug.

Overall Chrome is nice, And I expect it will have impact to browser market. We will see how much market share it might gain.

September 3rd, 2008 Posted by Giedrius | Reviews |Tags: browser, chrome, webdevelopment | one comment