This may be the reason I stop using Chrome even though I was a member of the team for 5 years. I NEED TO EDIT URLs. I need to copy and paste URLs. It was already annoying enough with it's removing of the protocol because sometimes I make a typo, try to edit it and it messes up and removes the protocol forcing me to edit it a 3rd time only after it goes as searches for something. Even as just a user I copy and paste U…
stop using Chrome That may solve this particular problem, but then which browser do you use instead? Firefox has had its history of similar changes (although you can still use extensions), Opera post-12 lost a ton of customisability, and IE, although appearing to have the fewest irritating interface changes, also has the most rendering quirks. (Personally I'm less concerned with the rendering quirks than the UI chang…
There are a few fundamental uses I see, and they're somewhat distinct:
• Reading. For which stripping 99.99966% of Web formatting would be preferred. If I got content-heavy sites in a form similar to what Readability, Pocket, Instapaper, etc., delivers, I'd be much happier. Well, slightly less grumpy. I found it interesting that the Kobo tablet was, for a while, advertising its browser as doing just that (from what I can tell of the revised copy, they're offering built-in Pocket). See: http://www.kobobooks.com/tablets Online forums are another special case.
• Commerce. Here authentication and payment are concerns. Neither are built in to existing HTML standards.
• Applications. Something that's more than just putting words (and images) on a page, or buying stuff. For this I'm actually inclined to think that the Mobile app model might be more appropriate. Say I want ... an email tool, or an interactive mapping tool, or a host monitoring solution, etc. Running this in a separate process space, in a separate windowing context, individually controllable, etc., would be a huge win.
The other element is user state: there are very few cases where I need a specific browser page running at all times (selected apps are the exception). What I do want is to be able to return to the page state I'd last left it at. With very aggressive paging out of state to local storage, and/or simply leaving a marker of "this is where you were at", and being able to recall it as needed, overall performance would vastly improve.
Neither Firefox nor Chrome presently offers this. On Firefox, there's a single process space, such that all tabs become unresponsive when system resources are exhausted. On Chrome, there are multiple subprocesses, which are individually much heavier-weight than Firefox's own tabs, but which can be individually killed. You have to reference them indirectly, however, through a task manager, rather than being able to simply kill the tab you're on at the moment (you can close it, you cannot kill it). In both cases I'm finding myself constantly manually managing resources. I've also found myself abandoning Firefox for Chrome as with the former I've got to kill/restart the whole thing, while Chrome gives more granular control, and Chrome tends to crowd out FF for resources. Both are very far from optimal.