Metropol

Erm, I'm not sure about this at all, its very, erm, nothingish. Reminds me too much of safari but without the font smoothing nonsense. Scroll in particular is horrid compared to firefox, its too fast and jerky.

It reminds me of a mobile browser or something, there's no application attached. I mean I suppose that's part of the intention but I don't like it.

BBC header is duff here too.

More to the point though, aside from trying to push gears with it I see very little point to the whole exercise. Firefox is already smothered in googleness and they're using a rendering engine which already exists and doesn't do that much different than others, and while we're on that subject, why doesn't acid2 render correctly? How old is this build?

The idea of having each tab as a separate process is rather interesting, however just at a random test it appears to use more RAM than firefox is using with more tabs open, and the problem that this is solving is partly solves by session savers in the other browsers.

Finally is it me or is the speed mostly due to it simply beginning the rendering quicker rather than waiting for a moment and therefore getting more of the page. This is an old mozilla trick to "speed up" rendering however they don't do it by default as it actually slows down browsing in the long term due to frequent reflows.

Suffice to say, I think its a crock of shit and shayl be uninstalling it rather soon.

The tab privacy thing is really stupid issue. Of course there are porn issues. But it has genuine non-porn issues too. If I see something a friend would like for birthday/Christmas, I bookmark it. It is then visible as a "new bookmark" every time a tab is opened for anyone using the browser on my machine.

Pants. Not for me. Not for now anyway.

marksi wrote:The tab privacy thing is really stupid issue. Of course there are porn issues. But it has genuine non-porn issues too. If I see something a friend would like for birthday/Christmas, I bookmark it. It is then visible as a "new bookmark" every time a tab is opened for anyone using the browser on my machine.

Pants. Not for me. Not for now anyway.

I like some of it - the tab thing is a real pain - and a STUPID idea.
Why do you need to open a new tab to view your bookmarks?
I know you can show it all the time but it add another line to the toolbar - I would have thought a small Icon to the right of the tools icon is enough - the address bar does not need to be that long.. plenty of space.

With the bookmarks bar, there's a handy little "other bookmarks" dropdown button. I like my bookmarks toolbar though, such a handy thing.

The default homepage could be rather cool, will need more experience. And Marksi, on the porn issue/present, there's an option to open a tab/window where it won't save the site you're going on.

marksi wrote:The tab privacy thing is really stupid issue. Of course there are porn issues. But it has genuine non-porn issues too. If I see something a friend would like for birthday/Christmas, I bookmark it. It is then visible as a "new bookmark" every time a tab is opened for anyone using the browser on my machine.

Pants. Not for me. Not for now anyway.

i personally think it's a really nice idea, but i think the issue of privacy is actually a bigger issue than this, and it started with opera - with it's address bar (and the firefox address bar) a passing user can even inadvertently see what you've been looking at or searching for.

there are people i know who have their browser set to clear the cache and history after each session but that's a real pain because the productive gains which users of these features will benefit from are dependent on you letting the browser build up a history so you can get at your favourite sites in as fewer mouse clicks as possible.

i think it should at least be possible for features like this to be disabled, but i actually really really like it, and i also note that the browser appears to also create fully searchable index of all the text on the page- again, i find this very useful and i wished firefox did it as it does help my memory and help find previous pages you've visited where the url or title is less than descriptive.

Neil Green wrote:

cdd wrote:What a boring browser it is. I like the way the tabs stick to the top of the screen and the History Search feature, but apart from that it's a bit short on features. Like Safari.

You're wrong, cdd.

Sod whether it's 'boring', it's fast!

1) It's not that much faster for me, it's about the same speed as Safari is. I think part of the reason it feels faster is because
2) It lacks features I use every day - examples = full page zoom, live bookmarks, err, RSS in general actaully
3) WHY is having one absolutely huge address bar any advantage at all?
4) WHY doesn't its find feature search within text boxes? Firefox did back when it introduced inline search and I was always somehow rather impressed that it did, but now I have stumbled across some stupid browser that doesn't bother...

Hyma is spot on what he says about the scroll wheel, it doesn't use "Smooth Scrolling", Firefox and IE have that enabled by default and it makes a serious difference. It's not bad, it's just nothing special. They haven't actaully innovated. I love the tabs at the top, so you don't have to align vertically (just slam the mouse up to the top and align horizontally), but that's not nearly enough.

I quite like how in the ultimate act of betrayal, the built in spell checker in Chrome won't recognise the word "Firefox" as a valid word!

Hate the way the download bar stays open until you manually close it. Waste of screen space, especially when you have files such as videos set to automatically open. You don't need the download bar then.

As for scrolling, I've always turned off Window's smooth scrolling - both in Explorer and IE - as I absolutely detest it, so Chrome's scrolling is fine.

The wierd lettering on the BBC News header would appear to be a problem with Windows' ClearType rendering, as when you turn ClearType off, the problem disappears.

JonathanEx wrote:With the bookmarks bar, there's a handy little "other bookmarks" dropdown button. I like my bookmarks toolbar though, such a handy thing.

The default homepage could be rather cool, will need more experience. And Marksi, on the porn issue/present, there's an option to open a tab/window where it won't save the site you're going on.

That's not the issue, it's really not a porn thing.

Anything I bookmark today will be visible for the indeterminate future on the page displayed when a new tab is opened. Someone else using my browser isn't going to open the "secretive mode" window, they're going to open a normal tab!

For a beta it's not half bad. The lack of polish and whatnot is annoying, but to be expected. I know many of you will see it as a gimmick but I really like the psuedo-app thing where I can spin off both my gmail accounts into their own windows with different icons.

I think the best thing to come out of this is the inspiration it will give Firefox extension developers to copy all the nice things Chrome does. I really like the highlighting of find text results in the scrollbar, so fingers crossed someone will do that for FF.

Netizen wrote: I know many of you will see it as a gimmick but I really like the psuedo-app thing where I can spin off both my gmail accounts into their own windows with different icons.

Right I've seen three people singing the praises of this feature and I can stay silent no longer.

This is a blatent copy of the hypertext application, and since when is opening a browser window with application level privileges and no GUI a "huge advance in innovation"?

Change the extension of any local HTM file to HTA and you have basically the same feature.

also, with regards to webapps, firefox 3 includes the ability to add gmail and yahoo mail and the like as protocol handlers. In addition to this the fact that Gecko is heading towards 2.0 means they can make some major changes to internal apis in firefox so many of the bits where chrome beats it (as in about two features) can be done nicer.

Still vastly unimpressed.

Right do excuse me, I've got two dysons and I'm going to dyson my dyson. Byeee.