Longing for a break

Ever since the recent updates to Safari 4 on Mac things haven’t entirely been right:

• Sometimes page elements weren’t loading, hit refresh and they’d load but others would disappear
• Pages would load but the tab icon would always show the loading animation
• A look at the status area of the browser always seemed to indicate an error with 1 from x elements not loading
• In Facebook behaviours would either load or not (in one game I’d click “chart” and it’d jump to top of page, reload and it’d display the chart)

Overall I quite like Safari 4, I really like the homepage tiles that indicated if things had updated since you’d visited (although I find this sometimes a bit buggy), but these bugs really have begun to niggle at me.  So it was that I decided that I would switch to Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (which I use as my primary at work).  In the back of my mind I also knew that Google were working on a version of Google Chrome for Mac OS X, thus a bit of research was needed.  I did a search on the Whirlpool forums and discovered a link to a .dmg on the google site, thus I switched over to Google Chrome (4.0.220.0) this afternoon.  I am not even sure whether this version is alpha or beta software, neither designation appears within the “About Google Chrome” dialog, but the stability thus far appears reasonably solid.

I haven’t used Chrome for a while, not since I swapped to Mac in December, although my roomie uses it as her preferred browser.  I was always impressed by the browser’s speed, but when you compare it to any version of Internet Explorer ANYTHING looks quicker doesn’t it.  I am not sure when themes appeared for Chrome, whether they existed before or not, but I decided to give them a try.  Let me just say this, how anyone could release a theme which doesn’t even allow you the ability to read your tab’s title is beyond me, some of them looked nice, but bugger me if I could read the tab titles in them.  One I downloaded was ‘transparent’, so I downloaded this in the vain hope it would be sort of Vista’ish and show the desktop through the browser’s chrome (pun intended), how dumb I felt when all it did was show Photoshop’s transparency squares.  BORING!

Upon startup Chrome imported my favourites from Safari with complete ease, something I have never gotten with Firefox installations where I always seemed to need to move items into another area of the Bookmarks structure.

I wonder how far this browser is from a wider release, by the feel of things it can’t be too far.  Oh, and Facebook seems to be working much nicer in this browser than it did with Safari, hoping Apple either fixes this up, or it is something that will be fixed by Snow Leopard.