ThingsChromeDoesntHave

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(And I write this as a Firefox user...)

  • Lots of engineers all over the planet working for it. [1]

  • Deep involvement in standards groups (how do you link to a single page of the Chrome comic? I don't mean image, I mean page). It's more of an Apple-level involvement.

  • Win2k support (the default at my workplace).

These are things that influence the long-term development of a piece of software.

And then there are things that Chrome has that don't matter one bit:

  • Upside-down tabs

There are things I will hate about Chrome:

  • The phishing and malware blacklists.

But there are Things Chrome Gets Right

  • Test-based development.

  • Auto-complete for site-specific searches.

  • Tab-tied pop-ups.

Chrome's big selling point is separate processes for separate tabs. Is there places where this could be a downside? Tabs should have relationships: tab A was opened from tab B by a middle-click, but tab C was user-created.

Also, watch for the "develop computer effect" [1], which is that apps developed in-house tend to only be tested on the latest and fastest hardware. Watch for sluggish performance with Chrome working on your grandma's (or your own) PC.

UPDATE: And now here's evidence of [1] at work, on Slashdot:

And, yuck, they checked in a whole bunch of binaries. If you so a checkout of the Subversion repository (weighing in at 1.5G for the single revision checkout, 8G or so to build!) it is a huge mess. I don't think Chrome is going anywhere for a long time due to these maintainability problems you mentioned, and you won't find hackers poking around Chromium with the mess that the codebase is in. Plus, it's all tied very closely to Windows, and who wants to hack in the hacker-unfriendly Windows?

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=962865&cid=24990175