Where am I?

I’m giving Chrome 5.0.375.55 a chance to take over from Firefox 3.6. Here are my thoughts so far:

The minimalist windows take some getting used to, but I do enjoy the extra pixels. I turned off the bookmark toolbar, of course. The speed is nice, and I’ll be interested to see if battery life is significantly better or worse than with Firefox 3.6.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my bookmark keywords and bookmarklets imported without a hitch. Most of the keyboard shortcuts seem to match with Firefox. I have already installed a few extensions: here is a list. I’m still using privoxy to handle most web annoyances, so I don’t care about AdBlock.

1. FlashBlock
2. Type-ahead-find
3. XML-Tree
4. ChromeReload

So far my biggest problem is cq. I have a fix for the keyboard shortcuts, but I can’t get XML-Tree to pick up the results frame as XML. I can see the Content-Type header is text/xml for the results frame, but I think perhaps XML-Test doesn’t handle this situation. I may need to dust off the older idea of having the browser evaluate an XSLT to display the tree – perhaps with Chrome it will be fast enough to be a worthwhile solution.

I would also like to get emacsclient working. I know about Edit with Emacs, but I’m not yet convinced that I want to run a second micro-server inside emacs.

It annoys me that Type-ahead-find doesn’t work on chrome:// pages. Of course this is a security precaution, but it also points out why keyboard access should be well thought-out as part of the user experience. Supplementing an incomplete keyboard experience with extensions dooms keyboard users to an incomplete experience.