I have been looking at the Google Chrome browser and have found solutions to all but two of the issues that would prevent me from switching to using it.
Alerts - Opera pops them up nicely centred in the viewport. Chrome pops them up centred in te entire screen which means they are way off to one side where they can be easily missed if I am concentrating on the browser and not paying as much attention to the other half of the screen (and since they are equally offset from the program running in that half of the screen are also likely to be missed when I switch attention to that program. Is there any way to get Chrome to keep its popup alerts within the browser window?
Chrome seems to be missing some of the more essential toolbar buttons. I managed to find a print button to add to the toolbar but havebeen unable to locate that most essential of buttons - rewind.
I’m just curious, what makes you want to switch away from Opera?
I’m considering dumping firefox and going back to Opera, since firefox has proven to be quite unstable for me (freezing and crashing several times a day). I was wondering if there were any show stoppers or technical issues in the current version of Opera that are making you switch.
I have no problems with the stability of Chrome (it’s as stable as a rock), but is severely lacking in the customization department. Google is also extremely protective of what extensions mess with the UI, so it’s not very likely you’ll be able to add any additional buttons if there isn’t already an extension for it (I’ve seen them shut down discussions about the UI on their support site).
The upside is that it is extremely easy to write extensions for Chrome as they are nothing more than javascript, css, and optionally a bit of HTML (if you want to go more advanced). This is completely sandboxed so they will never clash with scripts from the website itself (i.e., if the website runs a different version of jQuery than your script that’s perfectly fine because the two can’t even see each other).
I’m not sure if you can change that, but why do you have alert boxes? If it’s for debugging I’d recommend console.log instead, which is a lot less obtrusive and a lot less annoying when you have a lot of messages to debug.
If you press and hold the back button for a few seconds you get a drop down with the websites you just visited (i.e., the window.history stack). Is that what you mean?
And indeed I would be interested to know why you’re switching as well. I get that people switch from FF to chrome (like I did) seeing that FF seems to have lost all direction and are just releasing new versions willy-nilly nowadays, but people abandoning Opera doesn’t happen very often
Interesting note: 3 or 4 days after they released FF8, FF9 beta was released.
As for abandoning opera, I abandoned it over a year ago (after being a die-hard user for almost 10 years) because of an intermittent bug that rendered random webpages (but not entire sites) as blank pages in version 10. The only way to get a page to load after it was blanked out was to jump to another browser. I’m hoping it’s been corrected by this point.
I don’t know why Chrome pops up alerts all over the place while you are trying to configure it - you’d need to ask Google about that.
A history list is way less efficient than a rewind button.
I have some pages I need to use that do not display properly in Opera (eg. the control panel for my NAS). I heard about how much Chrome had improved lately and was hoping that it might be able to handle everything for me instead of my only using it when I need to use the pages that don’t work in Opera.
As I don’t want to rewrite the OS for my NAS and don’t want to write extensions for Chrome I guess I’ll stick with swapping between the two as necessary.
Indeed. The overall percentage has always been a small piece of the pie. But it’s still used widely enough to be included as one of the top browsers. It doesn’t hurt that it’s been around since 1996. If mozilla and other browser developers like to steal feature ideas from opera, opera must be doing something right.
Opera is also used on many mobile devices, plus some gaming systems–not just PCs and laptops. Other developers (outside of apple) can’t say the same thing.
