The two biggest issues with Chrome
According to the latest statistics Google’s Chrome browser is now used more than any other browser, including all versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
This is pretty amazing when you consider that, by and large, all corporates users use Internet Explorer almost exclusively. This is mainly due to the ability of IT departments to manage and control the usage of Internet Explorer in a managed corporate environment.
If you look at the numbers without the corporate users included then Chrome is far and away the most used browser with an estimated 60 percent of users using it. The next nearest is FireFox with 24 percent.
Amazingly, Apple’s Safari browser is down to just 3.7 percent even though it is pre-installed on all Apple computers.
I have two problems with Chrome.
The first is that, unlike almost every other application that you will use on Windows, Chrome does not use the inbuilt Windows font smoothing and aliasing technology. I have no idea why the developers of Chrome do this. This means when you use it on Windows the font rendering in Chrome looks kind of thinner and more grey.
Following is an example. The first clip is from Chrome. The second is from Internet Explorer.
It might be a little subtle to people not tuned into looking at fonts, but notice how the text in the Chrome clip tends more to grey and is thinner (less solid) than the text in the second clip from Internet Explorer?
The second thing that bugs me is the you cannot set Chrome so that when you open a link in a new tab the new tab is opened in the foreground. So if you right-click a link and select “Open link in new tab” the new tab goes to the background. Ditto if you Ctrl+Click a link. It opens in the background.
Other browsers such as Internet Explorer, Opera, and FireFox allow you to set them such that when you open in a new tab the tab opens in the foreground.
Before all the Chrome users jump on an tell me that if I do Shift+Ctrl+Click then the link will open in the foreground, I already know that. But I want to set Chrome such that any link I open in a new tab comes to the foreground.
