Google Gears and Chrome… awesome

I’m not exactly sure what this Google Gears thing is yet, but I do know that I can now “search” through my MySpace inbox thanks to it, and that is VERY awesome.  Would’ve been nice if MySpace built that in, but hey. That’ll save a LOT of time next time I go look for “that email from that band who wanted to set up that show”…

In related news, I also installed the new browser “Google Chrome” today.  So far, I like it, though I noticed a few problems already:

• I can’t use the mouse wheel click and drag method of scrolling on a page on it.  That’s strange and nearly a show-stopper for me.
• When scrolling, it jumps like 3 lines at a time and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it scroll any more smoothly or finely.
• I can’t update a few things in Facebook in it, like changing the options on an entry in my feed or something.
• You can’t right click on the “back” arrow, choose an item from it at random, and scroll-click on it to open that item in its own tab, like you can in Firefox.  Shame.

Since it’s still in Beta, I’m hopeful those bugs and others will be fixed soon.  But, some things I do like about it:

• Rearranging tabs by dragging and dropping.
• Dragging a tab out from a window into its own window.
• Dragging a separate window into another window as a tab.
• Search and URL-entering in the same box is a nice shortcut.
• If a tab crashes, it’s its own process and so won’t take down your whole browser.
• For text entry form fields, it adds that little triangle at the bottom right of the field so you can drag and make the box bigger, sorta like in WordPress.  Sweet!

Overall, it’s no Firefox 3 yet (which I quite like), but it’s definitely a contender.  I’d choose it over IE7 any day already, and probably IE8, from what little I’ve seen of that so far.  (I also just downloaded that today.)  Though, that being said, I do wish there was an “IE Tab” type plugin for it, as some sites do still “require” IE, unfortunately.