I love Google Chrome, and was thinking about keeping it around even though there are not a lot many plug ins for it yet. However, some things are holding me back.
First I do not like the Google Updater that it makes you install. There are ways to manually remove it, but somehow it always seems to be running in the background. I do not need constant updates to Google, let me use my browser in peace.
Google Chrome also does not appear to use your host file. Google is checking with it’s own DNS server instead of going off of your hosts file. Why is this a big deal? For developers. We have a sandbox server that we use to build websites before they are rolled out. We direct our domains to these servers with our hosts files. Chrome never allows us to get to our sandbox servers via our host file.
I appreciate Google’s efforts to innovate, and change things up. But I would appreciate some sort of option for both of these above. I can live with both of them, but options in general are very nice. It seems that Google does not want to give the user very many options. I hope future revisions get better.
Spot on! Google is starting to get very clueless, on their way to becoming the new Microsoft.
I stopped using Google Earth because of the broken ‘installer’ which forces you to load a bootstrap and then install ‘over the wire’. This is brain dead.
The Google updater is evil, as is anything that always runs in the background for the benefit of and control by anyone but you the end user who owns your machine.
A browser, or any networked app, that bypasses the hosts file is just plain moronic.
All those PhD’s down there in Mountin Vue need to get out more, or at least read up on use cases.
They are doing this to keep you from bypassing Google Analytics.
The hosts file thing it the biggest problem I’ve had with Chrome so I haven’t been too upset. Fortunately for me I setup all my dev sights on an external DNS server and real domain even though they can still only be accessed internally.
I haven’t had any problem using Chrome with my local hosts file. I have several dev and test sites running on a server in my house, inaccessible to the outside world. They’re running on Apache 1.3 using named virtual hosts. I’ve created entries for those hostnames in the hosts file on a PC running Win XP, and Chrome connects just fine. I’m currently running Chrome 1.0.154.36, but it also worked on the beta version I was running a month ago.