For everyone asking what's wrong with Chrome's URL bar, here's one specific example I run into.
I go visit Google Analytics relative often. In Firefox, I can start typing analytics.. and it pulls up GA as an option very quickly. With chrome it never shows up at all, instead I have to start typing google, and it'll show up as the 3rd or 4th option.
It's hard to remember all the specific annoyances, but this is one of a handful where FF's awesome bar really outshines Chromes. Now I'm willing to make the tradeoff because Chrome on linux is still MUCH faster the FF.
I use Chrome instead of FF despite the address bar. Other annoyances:
- Address you enter disappears when you hit enter, doesn't reappear until the page loads. This is a problem if the page spins for a long time; it can be indistinguishable from a total failure.
- Type-ahead will occasionally find matches like "ha" -> "Hacker News" despite the address being "news.ycombinator.com" which is good, but... When you type the "c", that result will disappear! It's really unpredictable and that makes it hard to use.
- The status bar's "..." replacement can be good, but it occasionally elides the important part of an address, like "...blogspot.com/..." Not useful.
That said, Chrome is vastly more usable (on OS X) than FF just because of its speed and stability. I only use FF for Firebug now.
If you're on the dev channel, web inspector has improved immensely. It's seriously cut down on the amount of time I've had to spend in FF.
Great job pulling out some of the other annoyances. I've definitely been bitten by that one.
While both Chrome and FF's systems are probably better than it ever was, I still miss Galeon's old URL completion bar. It essentially behaved like tab completion in bash. So when you hit tab it completed out to the longest common match in your history. It was awesome for navigating to different parts of sites you visit often.
Chrome should really steal the heuristics that Quicksilver (http://github.com/tiennou/blacktree-alchemy) uses for its auto-completion. After just a few weeks of use, I reached the point where Quicksilver seemed to read my mind. If I type in the three or four most significant characters of what I'm looking for, it'll just show up.
I go visit Google Analytics relative often. In Firefox, I can start typing analytics.. and it pulls up GA as an option very quickly. With chrome it never shows up at all, instead I have to start typing google, and it'll show up as the 3rd or 4th option.
It's hard to remember all the specific annoyances, but this is one of a handful where FF's awesome bar really outshines Chromes. Now I'm willing to make the tradeoff because Chrome on linux is still MUCH faster the FF.