Google Chrome

I downloaded Google Chrome today to give it a quick spin. A lot has been written about it, it's interface and it's performance, so I won't duplicate any of that here.

One of the first things I wanted to do was test it for compatibility with some of my JavaScript gadgets on Wikibooks. Lo and behold, it had exactly the same compatibilities as Safari. Since they are both based on Webkit, that makes good sense to me, although I thought Chrome had a different JavaScript engine. One of the problems that Safari has always had was that i couldn't download an edit window and embed it in a gadget, and I never knew why. Firefox did it fine, and I could even manage (with a little back-door hackery) to make the feature work in IE too. But for some reason, it never worked in Safari.

So, I was feeling a little bit disappointed because I was starting to think that Chrome was basically Safari but with less resource demand and a slimmer interface. That is, I was disappointed till I found the developer tools. Unlike Safari (at least, so far as I could find) Google has JS debugging tools built in. Finally, I was able to figure out what the problem was in my scripts for all these months.

The problem, it turned out, was that Firefox was allowing a particular behavior (moving a node from one document to another without being imported first) that isn't technically part of the spec. Webkit is more strict apparently, and doesn't allow this. So, I went back to do things The Right Way, and of course that's introduced some more bugs for me to work through. I'm hoping to have it tonight, and then the only bugs left will be IE-related (go figure).

All in all it is a neat little browser, but I'm not going to switch to it from FF3 yet. Especially not after some of the amazing things I've heard about FF3.1Beta.