Native Google Chrome on Mac OS X: First Impressions | Hacker News Reader

Native Google Chrome on Mac OS X: First Impressions

manu-j.com

It is zippy and although the full-screen view breaks Spaces it gets rid of the already minimal "chrome" (to access click the address bar arrows). Some standard options - even a Preferences menu - are grayed out so it feels very bare-bones. I keep getting the aw, Snap! error message (http://s3.amazonaws.com/2009/chrome.png) for no apparent reason and there doesn't appear to be any developer tools for the user yet. So I won't be using Chrome for demos anytime soon but it was fun to explore for a couple minutes what has been strictly a Windows phenomenon.

(Just wanted to say that Chrome for Linux/Mac is still definitely in the pre-alpha stage, and that current appearance/flakiness is hopefully not indicative of the final product. I switched to Chrome for most of my regular web browsing, and I hope you will revisit it when its ready ;))

If it is indeed comparable in speed to the excellent Safari 4 beta, I'll stick with Safari. It has worked very well for me over the past few weeks. In fact I've yet to find a single problem with it.

The only advantage from what I understand, is that Chrome is supposedly more "secure".

I don't think it is enough to be worth giving up flash/etc for, however.

Who's giving up Flash? Chrome supports Flash and is rigged such that when Flash crashes (on a Mac that happens all the time) it only takes out the one tab. When Chrome comes out for OS X you'll be able to use Flash all you want. The linked article isn't discussing a shipping product, just a build of the still very much in progress code base.

I've been running WebKit nightlies on OS X for a year or so and generally been happy with Safari. That said I think there are two big things to look forward to in Chrome:

- Plugins in separate processes. No more beach balls or crashes from Flash.

- Tabs in separate processes. No more beach balls or crashes from Google apps.

If its just Flash that is eating up cpu or crashing Safari, give ClickToFlash (http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master) a try.

People, please don't downvote stuff you disagree with unless it's troll-ish. Seeing two run-of-the-mill, if wrong, comments in this thread that were at -2 is just silly.

Agreed and I pay for .Mac so the bookmark synchronization across multiple Macs and my iPhone is pretty glorious.

Looking forward to a more stable Safari 4 tho, mine freezes at least 3 times a day where as 3 was pretty stable, aside from the rare script crashing it.

The graph is less helpful without a nightly-to-nightly comparison.

Safari 4.0 beta was released recently, but is still using technology from a much older WebKit nightly.

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