Another black mark for Google Chrome
After yesterday’s fairly glowing review – 35 out of 50, if I recall correctly – I’ve found a problem with Chrome.
Debugging a web application this morning, I needed to view the source of the page I was looking at. It’s a farily complex application (a 100K page is generated by about 700K of code), and it was crucial that I get to see what the page was doing. No problem, you’d think. View source. Except…
In every other browser I know, you get to see the source of the page you’re looking at. Opera, Firefox, IE… even Netscape 4 will show you the source of the page you’re looking at. If you need to refresh it first, you refresh it. Not so with Chrome. The source shown to me bore no resemblance to what I was looking at – and why? Chrome had done another round trip to the server, and presented me with a nice, refreshed copy of the page. Thus making it impossible to track down the bug.
Now, without Chris Pederick’s wonderful Web Developer toolbar, the uses of Chrome (or indeed, any browser other than Firefox or Flock) as a developer’s browser are somewhat limited. But for people like me – you know, developing stateful applications that post things back to a database and read from that, which is (these days) round about every medium-size site in the world, Chrome just dropped a point.
In future, if I need to know whether something works in WebKit, I’ll use Safari.
Tags: browser, browser wars, Firefox, Flock, Google Chrome, Web Developer toolbar, webkit