Frank Carver’s Punch Barrel

Lots of people seem to be writing about this today. Google have released an initial beta of their new browser “Chrome”. It’s designed to be pretty much crash-proof and to run complex JavaScript applications fast and robustly. It’s also designed as a poke at Microsoft.

My initial impression is that it looks and works generally nice enough, although I really miss all my favourite Firefox plugins. It also seems somewhat flaky (or at least, out of sync with its own help docs). I tried dragging a tab to the Windows task bar to create a new browser, and all I ended up with was a weird task bar icon which animated but would not open up into a window. There is also supposed to be some feature which lets you enter the name of a search engine in the location box, press tab, and enter some search terms. For me that simply refuses to work - when I press tab it either takes me to the first input field in the current page, or to the next page tab. What’s up with that?

A group calling itself OpenAjax Alliance is asking for votes on future browser features.

InfoQ: What Do You Want On Future Browsers? Time to Vote!

Their list still doesn’t include my top feature - printing that works.

Despite all these years and browser versions, attempting to print a web page is likely to either get the page size wrong and fail to print part of each line of text or to screw around with the layout resulting in an unusable mess. This is astonishing, given that all modern browsers support arbitrary re-arrangement of a page to suit changes in browser window size but can’t seem to handle a fixed-size piece of paper in a printer.

Technology Review: Firefox Goes Mobile