Testing Google Chrome
Just downloaded the the developer preview of Chrome for Mac OS X. It seems to mostly work pretty smoothly in a few minutes' testing, but I can't see any reason that I would rather use it than Safari. A few notable oddities:
The preferences window features a couple of examples of strangely truncated text.
Turing off the "Ask where to save each file before downloading" check box seems to do nothing.
I'm given a warning that I "have chosen to open certain file types automatically after downloading", which in fact I did not, it's the default setting and that I can change this behavior by clearing the auto-open settings. Too bad the "Clear auto-opening settings" button is disabled. Likewise, I'm not allowed to Change the font and language settings, or to manage trusted SSL certificates.
I really can't imagine what they did to cause the contextual menus to popup in fixed position at the bottom left corner of the screen, regardless of where the mouse cursor was when the menu was invoked.
In addition I can't stand how heavily it forces the user to use tabs. Opening a link in a new window requires using the currently broken contextual menu, or a truly unintuitive modifier combination with a mouse click, ⌥⇧-Click, in spite of the fact that ⌘-Click opens the link in a new tab, and ⌥-Click downloads the linked content. Isn't opening in a new window more closely related to opening in a new tab than saving the linked resource to disk?
Most of the above points are minor user interface details that will no doubt be resolved for the actual main release. I don't see much of anything really wrong with Chrome, aside from clashing badly with my preferred style of web-browsing, but I just can't see any compelling reason to use it given that I already have Safari.