Chrome

I started using chrome as my main browser. What was holding me back was that the webkit developer tools for a long time just weren’t as good as Firebug. Now they are almost on a par. So I’ve been using Chrome as my main web browser for coming up to two months now and for the most part it has been a fantastic experience. Chrome is just lightning fast, from startup to rendering to javascript performance. I don’t have any benchmarks, but everything just feels really "light".

This could be because I’m coming from Firefox with three plugins installed: Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar and Adblock Plus…but I get the feeling that if I disabled the Web Developer Toolbar and Adblock Plus, Firefox still wouldn’t feel as light. Anyway, this isn’t why I started the blog post. I really wanted to vent a couple of frustrations I have with the browser. Seemingly minor frustrations that could probably be fixed really easily. Here they are:

  1. I can’t change the default font or page background colour or if I can, I can’t find where I do it. I change the default font and background colour from black to dark red and from white to grey respectively so that when I build websites I remember to set a default font and background colour in my reset
  2. It is really hard to save a 1×1 pixel image from a website to my desktop. I have to pinpoint the exact pixel on the screen and right click on it. I haven’t figured out an easier way of doing this…if there even is one
  3. When saving an image using the network tab of the developer tools the filename becomes "download" and _not_ the filename of the image I am saving
  4. Lastly, no out-of-the-box RSS support. I really miss it, and I love Firefox’s implementation of it in the bookmarks bar. N.B. I realise there is a plugin.

Update: Hardware accelerated alternative to jQuery animate() top, left, width, height and opacity CSS properties for iPhone/iPad

Update to my post here – I’ve tweaked the script to use CSS3 transitions on Firefox 4+ and Opera 10.50+ as well as modern webkit based browsers such as Chrome and Safari.

The CSS3 transforms and transitions enhanced carousel can be found here:
freestyle-developments.co.uk/demo/public/portsurf/?css3

…and the normal carousel:
freestyle-developments.co.uk/demo/public/portsurf/

Source code for CSS3 transforms and transitions enhanced carousel

N.B. The normal carousel works in IE7 and IE9 beta, but not in IE8 (it seems IE8 can’t figure out the dimensions of DOM elements properly).