Google Chrome is great but for developers it’s not quite up to Firefox’s standards. Yet.

Since Google’s Chrome browser was released for Mac in late 2009 it’s become my default day to day browser, mainly because it’s so fast. It’s fast to start up and it’s fast to load pages and that’s what we all want for browsing the net.

For developing though it’s not quite up to Firefox‘s standard in a few key areas and I almost always find I have to switch back when working on sites.

Like many people I’ve long been a Firefox user and like many people, I’ve noticed Firefox getting slower and slower and choke on loading things that Chrome seems to breeze through. However there are still so many things it can do that no other browser can match right now – partly by its design and partly to the myriad of extensions available. Remember life before Firebug?

So why isn’t Chrome there yet as a developer’s browser? Here’s my list of niggles…

1. Chrome’s status bar isn’t wide enough to see full urls

This is incredibly frustrating! It looks like the status bar has a maximum width of around a third of the browser window. So with a browser open to an average width of 1000 pixels or so you just don’t see full urls of anything over 50 characters or so. To the average user this may not matter but to anyone who’s developing not being able to see where a link is pointing without having to go there is soooo frustrating.

Status bar in Chrome truncates urls

Status bar in Safari (top) and Firefox shows full urls

2. Chrome doesn’t show full page titles

This is a similar issue in many ways – perhaps Google’s aim to keep the interface clean has driven both of these? You only see each page’s title on its tab, which is not very wide (even if you only have one tab open). This means you can never  see a pages full title, and when you’ve got a number of tabs open at once (which let’s face it is is how things always are) you’re lucky to be able to read the first word. Firefox and Safari show the full page title above the tabs.

Page titles in Google Chrome are only shown on tabs and are truncated

Full length page titles shown above tabs in Safari (top) and Firefox

3. Chrome doesn’t have some of Firefox’s useful menu options

Being able to right-click and choose ‘View Image’ or ‘View Background Image’ and get an image in a tab with the filename, type and dimensions in the title bar is so simple browser makers should be forced to include this feature. Safari and Chrome doesn’t. Yet.

4. Firebug (lite) in Chrome has scrolling issues

Firebug is such a useful tool, particularly it’s ability to allow live css changes to be tested on a page. Firebug Lite was released for Chrome on mac early in 2010 and was the the one thing I was waiting for before making the switch. There is a small issue with scrolling though, in that you sometimes can’t scroll to the bottom of a page with Firebug pane turned on.

I understand this is something that is currently beyond the control of the Firebug developers but it pretty much makes it unusable right now.

5. The Chrome icon in my dock looks too similar to the Firefox icon

Maybe it’s habit but I just can’t help clicking the wrong icon because they’re quite similar. I’ve moved them away from being side by side but it’s not helping.

OK, this is stretching it…