Quick Chrome Impressions

I’ve been using Chrome as my primary web browser heavily for the last day, and I’ve already run into a few snags. I am probably a bit of a heavy user, so I’ve run into a few things that might not bother the average user, but to me they are flies in the otherwise pleasant ointment.

• mp3s/movies

Chrome treats media files very strangely. I suppose Google just assumes you will use YouTube to watch all movies. When I wanted to watch an .mpg video, it opened up in the browser, and secondly in Quicktime (UGH). The quicktime issue is problematic because Chrome doesn’t give you an option to change the default program. Very lame. Second, it opens up in the browser. I prefer to have the files open up in a separate media player. That way I can scale the video, or use any options the video player has.

• RSS feeds

I love RSS feeds. I have about 250 news feeds that I check daily. Allows me to quickly browse news in a central area. Chrome surprisingly does not handle RSS well. In other browsers, it renders the page like a normal webpage to give you a feel for what it looks like, and gives you an option to subscribe in the program of your choice. Chrome does nothing. It shows you the raw code- very unfriendly. Secondly, most browsers gives you that familiar orange radar signal symbol – Chrome does not.

I might be going back to Firefox sooner than later.