I write this not long after another Firefox crash (Atomic Decrement being the signature) and wiped three quite well worded (if I say so myself) paragraphs. To vent, I Tweeted, and received (again) the suggestion of switching to Chrome.
I appreciate the kind motive but Chrome is so severely lacking that last night, I actually removed it. When a program cannot do something that Netscape 1 can—I am not kidding—then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
I was surprised to see that Chrome, made by my “favourite” company Google, had updated itself to v. 9, and that every one of the problems it has had since I installed it (some time during v. 6 or 7?) were still present. I’m surprised that no one else seems particularly bothered by these, but in my opinion, they are serious enough to put me off using the program.
1. Can’t display bolds
You know those <b> and <strong> codes that have been around since the World Wide Web began to denote some bold text? Chrome can’t handle them. Every browser since Netscape version 1 could. Oh, that’s also not to mention the garbled and sometimes missing text:
Image may be NSFW.
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2. Problems with font linking
I’ve seen many complain about this one, and only one person I have encountered claims he has solved it. When I asked him how, he said he had homework but would get back to me after. He never did. So I presume he remembered wrongly, or he’s still doing his homework. IE, Firefox and Opera can link using font-face, but Chrome cannot, despite my having WOFFs and SVGs in there.
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My friend Andrew Carr-Smith has tested this page and confirms the error.
3. Cannot handle discretionary hyphens
Come on, even Internet-bloody-Explorer 5 knew the difference between a discretionary hyphen and a regular one. Chrome does not. It’s again a basic HTML entity, but I guess no one bothered testing it. Also note the font change in the callout and the extra dots Chrome has inserted with the breaking hyphens.
Image may be NSFW.
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Again, confirmed by Andrew on his machine.
4. Cannot display multilingual text
Google, the people behind the excellent Google Translate, can’t seem to work out how to display text that changes script, even when the various fonts are installed on the computer. This is a major omission in the days of Unicode and cross-cultural communications.
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5. Changes fonts mid-line
This is something that afflicts Opera a lot worse, but Chrome has a habit of changing the digit 8 in some of my text. In some other text, it has a problem displaying bold 7s. This is a new bug even Firefox is introducing as I sampled the 4 betas. Must be some geek humour, I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s bloody annoying.
Image may be NSFW.
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6. It’s dotty
Not sure why dots appear everywhere, but it’s the only browser which has them.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
As usual, no one at Google is listening and the forums are useless. Wonder where I heard that one before. Bye bye, Chrome.