Google Chrome hits version 5, brings stability to Mac and Linux
By Sean Hollister 
posted May 26th 2010 9:17AM
posted May 26th 2010 9:17AM
posted May 26th 2010 9:17AM
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Chrome is one of the best things that happened to the Internet.
@Kamalot Still not colour managed like FF/Safari so if you're doing anything with photography or need colours to look right then Chrome isn't the one for you.
Still hella fast though.
@lookseehear The color issue drives me insane.
@Kamalot
Half of my office is using Chrome, after I turned them on to it (most were previously using either FF or IE). It's the only browser I ever use any more, both at home and work.
@Kamalot It's true, I use Chrome all the time. Quality stuff right there.
@Kamalot
Just tried it with several pages including Engadget. Firefox is still faster.
@Kamalot
If you don't use Chrome or Firefox.. you ble--
Just use Chrome or Firefox. That is all.
@Kamalot
Agreed 100%. Only a matter of time before Chrome usage stats skyrocket past other browsers one by one.
@Kamalot I love Webkit heaps. If it weren't for the add-ons I use for development in Firefox, I would definitely be migrating to Chrome.
I made my wife try it and she loves how fast it is. Sadly, her office are backwards about supporting anything other than IE (and I believe they're stuck on 7).
@thisNthat I'm curious about these results. I've also tested multiple sites on Firefox and they do not load nearly as quick as Chrome 5 does.
@Mr Blue Lol
@thisNthat
Just tried Chrome. Wow! I am never going back to FF. Never.
@Kamalot I would say, even though some say that it isn't the best browser, it certianly has shaken things up, and made other browsers want to compete more.. Chrome definitely has done something right though.. Just look at their browser share! (Opera all the way :D)
@Kamalot I still like the awesome bar. It's so much more awesome than Chrome's bar.
@BecauseItsNotGoogle Gotta love adblock on chrome.
@Kamalot And actually the 3rd most popular browser on the planet, inching closer to IE 8. http://j.mp/7kembX
I switched from firefox to Chrome 2 weeks ago on my MBP and i haven't looked back since. It just seems faster even tho it doesn't have all the extras FF has.
@neeko18 I still like Firefox better. Some things just don't work right in Chrome (I can't remember specifically at the moment), and some things just feel weird. It's definitely fast though, I will give it that for sure.
@Gwanatu
It’s a Web-affair. Firefox is like your sedan and Google Chrome is a sports car. Chrome is slimmer, sharper on the edges, always amazes you with it’s speed over others and in fact, you can’t live without both. It’s easier to develop things on Chrome because the extensions are web applications coded with standard web languages (html, HTML 5, css, javascript, ajax).
Driving a sports car sure does feel different from driving a sedan though. You grow attached to the speed and handling of a fine automobile and realize that the back seat in Firefox was just being used to store junk anyway.
@neeko18 Safari is my main browser but I also use FF as my secondary. I'll give Chrome a shot and see if it can surpass FF as my alternate browser.
@neeko18
It has many useful extensions, if you didn't know about it here it is: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-bk-ext&utm_medium=ha
and if you use facebook alot there is an extension for enlarging the pics on the spot without loading a new site, its called Facebook Photo Zoom, really amazing.
@Gwanatu I switched for the security. Remember Chrome's lack of defeat at the pwn2own? That's when I switched.
I've been using FF with an ad blocker extension for several years now. I just downloaded Chrome and visited my normal sites.
It is amazingly fast, but it's kind of like starting your car early in the morning and forgetting that you had the radio set to 11 when you drove in the night before. The ads! The Flash! MY EYES!!!!!
I wonder if Google will put restrictions on content blocking given their primary business model...
Ok... found AdBlock for Chrome and all is right with the world again.
Zippy and clean... I'll give it a shot!
@neeko18
Just plain unib MB here. I load 4 sites (engadget 1st) whenever launching FF and setup same 4 sites w Chrome. Zero delays with Chrome. Pages load FAST and scroll like buttuh. FF was killing me with the memory leaks, long load times and stuttered page scrolls. Chrome is incredible!
@Gwanatu I know what you mean. I had trouble with add ons like auto pager for example. It behaved very differently than the one for FF loading pages in weird places regardless of settings. It also seemed like pages would render more to the upper left half of the screen instead of filling my monitor. Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of features I liked but my Internet is so slow the rendering speed doesn't really matter. I'll probably try it out again sometime though.
@Releaux Maybe I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but don't you ever wonder if using extensions that block ads isn't that ethical, really?
Some ads are really annoying, true, but take as an example sites like Engadget and Slashdot, which I visit every day. I know those sites rely on that advertising revenue, and I also don't want them to lose money / go out of business. For me it is plain wrong to block ads from sites that I visit 10+ times daily. Therefore I gladly tolerate the ads, hell I even keep an open mind when something that I'm interested in gets advertised (example here is the Adobe letter/flame war with Apple regarding Flash - I heard about it first here - from the ads) and even *shudder* click on them.
I guess what I'm trying to say It isn't that much of a big deal as people like you make it out to be really.The brain trains itself to ignore whatever is of no relevance to you, so I think that these extensions are totally unnecessary, but what's more important to me, they are ethically questionable.
Remember, you're getting something, for nothing, and you can give something in return, for nothing (no cost to you). If you don't think that's the right way, then I don't know...
@shpatar I don't like ad blocker. It kinda screws some sites main revenue streams , site doesn't make money= no more site
@medicmechanic
The obnoxiousness of the ads years ago caused me to give them the death sentence. They had their chance and they blew it. Every time I read about a drive by infection done through an ad server not owned by the site, I am reinforced that blocking is the correct thing to do.
The internet is big. If site goes belly up because of lack of advertising, no big deal. There are 40 other sites that offer the same content. I'll keep using my adblocker, and keep blocking 90% of tracking cookies, gifs, etc. Once I put together a media center PC, I record TV and skip pretty much all ads.
It's a moot point, really. At least 53% of users don't block advertising anyway (IE users). I'm sure the real total is closer to 80%. Anyhow, I'll let the saps pay my way.
@shpatar slashdot gave me an ad block checkbox, i left it unmarked. Pay the people you take from!
@shpatar
If sites want me to turn off adblocker... they have to make sure that the ads on their sites dont annoy the crap out of visitors. No visitor also equals zero revenue.
The worst are those ads that pop open to fill half the screen (on unintentional mouseover)...which hides half the content im trying to read.
I never found the Beta in the last year to be unstable at all. I'm still sticking with the Fox, its just personal taste.
@LowSky Pro tip: go to Tools --> Options or Edit --> Preferences, click, "Advanced", then go to the Update tab. Disable auto-checking for add-ons and search engines to speed up Firefox start-up. If you want, disable checking for new Firefox versions as well for even faster start-up.
You'll have to check for updates yourself, but with how seldom they come, it makes such a difference.
I love it, been using it since beta and never looked back.
What quirks are those? it sounds like they were introduced with Chrome 5?
@Kensall One thing is that when you download a file you can't choose to "open" it directly (so it saves to a temp directory for later deletion) - you have to save it somewhere (desktop) and THEN open it.
Chrome has really added to my desktop clutter.
@Horse Which isn't really Chomes fault, because you can just pick a folder where you wanna save it.
Which user would want to download something and keep a file somewhere you don't really know and hope it gets deleted sometime the next century? :S
That issue alone was nearly enough to turn me off of chrome. Combined with some other things, I'm back on firefox. I love chrome's UI, ut hate many of their design decisions and the comparable lack of customizability.
@maveric101 I can't go back to Firefox now that I've used Chrome. Firefox had all kinds of memory and stability issues on my computer, even with the stable public releases. Chrome is just so much faster.
Also, I love the search features. Firefox had the ability to make your own "quick links" using bookmarks with the "%s" operator, but Chrome's handling of it is just so much smoother.
That said, I agree that there's a general lack of customizability. I'm not thrilled with the opaque title bar in my Windows 7, too. Also Chrome has difficulty saving some password forms where Firefox was fine.
@Kensall
Tab switching can be slow sometimes and it can have problems with flash video on SOME computers where when you go to full screen the controls (play pause etc) don't work so you have to ALT+TAB or something to get out of full screen. I think this has something to do with the way Chrome separates tasks but this only happens on one of my computers so I use FF on that one. Other then that Chrome rocks I just wish it had the Ubiquity FF plugin.
@Horse
Not sure what youre talking about re open file... I have set to always save to User/downloads...
And anyways when I download (on win 7) I get the download bar at bottom of window, and when my downloads are finished I just click to open them from there and works evry time...
Search features are indeed very cool, like using Tab to search ebay right from the ominbox :)
@Horse Title bar is not opaque in default theme.
@Kensall
Just found a quirk: when I selected a bookmark from a subfolder off of a Bookmark bar folder, the subfolder stayed open. I had to restart Chrome to kill the subfolder. This is still a helluva lot better than FF.
"Hi, I'm IE", "I'm Safari", "and I'm CHHRRROME, I WILL EAT YOU BOTH" *a-nom nom nom nom nom....
@annoynimous
"Hi" [bares teeth] "I'm Firefox."
Chrome: [gulp!]
"And I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I A-A-A-A-A-M OPERA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A!"
(polite applause)
@Smart People Play Tuba More like "And I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I A-A-A-A-A-M OPERA-A--" (pelted with tomatoes)
@Smart People Play Tuba
Saying it out loud almost sounds like Oprah [Winfrey]...
@annoynimous
Firefox : "Want to know how I got all the extensions ? See my father, he was a web developer. My mom was troubled by all the adsharks. Wanted to leave him and move to Chrome, so with me watching, he made an extension called AdBlock Plus. Why you don't like it ?"
Chrome : *GULP*
No but seriously, I got really irritated 4-5 times when there was a horrible scroll jumping problem on Chrome. Even reinstalling it did not solve it for me. I don't use it anymore. I only miss the address bar search on FF. FF FTW.
@Shravan
Give the SmoothScroll chrome extension a try. I can't live without it now.