My first thoughts, were that, that was very wrong from Yahoo. So I tried it on another PC with Chrome and had been set up to use OpenDNS as the ISP’s DNS kept going down and having problems.

Quite clearly not a one off on the AVG results. The fact that they are so similar, either AVG toolbar uses Google for the search recommendations and Yahoo for the actual search feature or some SEO sites are spamming the keywords and getting some recommended words to the top of all search engines.

Either way it is inappropriate and you wouldn’t expect this, least of all when searching for something to do with Google itself. Perhaps they better put a redirect in for mail.google.co.uk to mail.google.com.

Closing multiple tabs

The huge flaw that is extremely irritating is no warning of closing multiple tabs.

If you have 10 tabs open and accidentally close the main window at the top right rather than the tab close button. Goodbye tabs.

You can have the sessions enabled to get it back once you open Chrome again but that isn’t very helpful if you had active downloads going when you accidentally closed the browser.

Earlier today I was download Portal: Prelude, an expansion modification for the game Portal. After download 550MB of the 775MB file, I accidentally closed Chrome forgetting that I had the download going.

IE and FF would of both stopped this from happening as they both open downloads in separate windows rather than the main browser, so if you close the main browser the downloads continue. Chrome does not.

I wasted that time and bandwidth downloading 550MB to be lost in the ether and having to download it again, because something so trivial was missed out of Chrome.

It doesn’t take a lot of common sense to know this is could be a problem, Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera all have implementations in place to stop this happening. The fact that Google took the best parts of all the other browsers in to 1 then deciding that a rather important feature wasn’t in their users best interest is worrying. How many other problems are there going to be under the surface?

Downloads

I have found that on many user initiated downloads that they just fail to start full stop on my Chrome installation at work and some downloads on my Chrome installation at home.

By clicking a download button the file will appear at the bottom of the browser and have ’starting…’ next to it but never progress past this stage. Right clicking the file and selecting Save as… works for all anchor links, but any downloads that are done through a form button are impossible to download which results in my opening up Firefox to download files.

Dictionary

You don’t seem to have the ability to add new words to the dictionary in Chrome which is rather strange. In Firefox you can and it is helpful when you type in something quite a lot and it isn’t in the dictionary, that little red line becomes annoying.

While writing this post, there are 2 words with red lines underneath them. The first is Firefox. Fair enough, it isn’t an actual word in the dictionary but still, Google do give a lot of money to the Mozilla foundation (which is in the dictionary). But the 2nd underlined word is an odd one indeed. It is Google. The company who have made the browser haven’t even put their name in the dictionary, instead suggesting that I meant to type goggle.

This is because the embed tag is not supported, although it works on most browsers.

The code you get from YouTube is something similar to this:

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<object width="425" height="344">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jJpx9MEi6_M&hl=en&fs=1"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jJpx9MEi6_M&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed>
</object>

Note that line #4 is the embed code that isn’t supported.

To make the code valid and work in most browsers (tested in IE6+, FF3, Chrome + Safari, Opera).

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<!--[if !IE]> <--> 
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="350" height="284" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/jJpx9MEi6_M&hl=en&fs=1"> 
<!--> <![endif]--> 
<!--[if IE]>
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="350" height="284" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
<![endif]--> 
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jJpx9MEi6_M&hl=en&fs=1" />  
<p>Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.</p> 
</object>

With the use of condition formatting we are able to set out the code to work in most (if not all) browsers.

View tutorial at Skeletorscorpse.com

In Firefox and IE, you get the same text:

Make note of the first paragraph. Now if you open up the same javascript window within Google Chrome, you get this:

Once again, note the first paragraph again.  Within Google Chrome it mentions the Safari menu. Safari is not installed on this computer so there is no reason for Safari to appear there other than Google Chrome being related to Safari in some way.

Also take note that yesterday, typing Google Chrome in to Google search, the results were very different.  In less than 1 day Google appears to have got it’s Chrome site to #1.