Faz's Fury

I downloaded the new Google Chrome (which I am using to type this post) and it is not good, not bad, but seems to be missing some features that are expected by 'power users' in a browser. First, cruise over to the Official Google Blog for a low down on Google's browser and see if you want to test drive yourself. Beware that, like all things Google, your privacy is their profit, but you do pay for free things in the long run.

Anyway, there are 2 things that I rely on in a browser that are lacking in my quick 10 minute tests:
1) Changing the Cookie handling to 'Restrict how third party cookies can be used' prohibited me form logging into Blogger. There were no additional configuration options, so I had to revert to 'Allow all cookies'.
2) I use x.509 certificates extensively to authenticate to web sites. I am impressed that Google Chrome uses the Microsoft Certificate Store under the covers, so all my Windows cert-management tools work (unlike having to additionally manage separate cert stores under the various Mozilla-based apps), I never get prompted for a user certificate authentication challenge, nor does it send a 'default' x.509 user certificate. Kudos for using an existing cert store, but poo-poo for not (yet) allowing user-certs for authentication.

Here is the About info:

Google Chrome
0.2.149.27 (1583)
Official Build
Google Inc.
Copyright © 2006-2008 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Safari/WebKit based? Oh noez!!!! But the dragging/reordering of tabs is pretty cool.

I have a long list of Firefox plugins that I use that are not available for Google Chrome (but since it was just released today, time will encourage developers to port their code), so FF will remain my default browser. My second beef is the name: Chrome. Mozilla already uses a framework named Chrome, and this only adds to the confusion. At any rate, I will give it more test drives, and will update this post as I discover more.