By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
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It's a trend we're noticing more and more with folks who use Web browsers: Google Search is becoming so ubiquitous that people are comfortable with typing a query rather than referencing a bookmark, to relocate a page they remember. It saves them the trouble of having to save the page in the first place. You think I'm kidding? Two of the search phrases that land Google users on Betanews most often are "beta news" and "Betanews."
So for a lot of people, the bookmarks file is becoming almost atrophied, a disused collection of stuff so old that the Internet Archive might have to look up its contents in a box of floppy disks. When using the browser's bookmarks manager becomes more troublesome, or just simply more time-consuming, than a Google query, a user may simply choose the latter.
Perhaps Google already came to that conclusion, or perhaps it would simply prefer users to store their bookmarks on its Web-based service. This is the only explanation I can attribute to the fact that the Chrome browser is coming up on one year of everyday public use without its Bookmark Manager feature developing even the simplest functionality.
Here's what I mean: I went ahead and imported my version of the Ancient Historical Bookmarks file into both the latest beta of Google Chrome 3 and Tuesday's final release of Mozilla Firefox 3.5, so that they both have the same set of bookmarks (other than what the manufacturers install there automatically). Both browsers' Bookmark Managers have the same names, and their windows are laid out quite similarly.
Knowing I might want to consider weeding out any 10-year-old links to RealNetworks sound files in my archive, I started out conducting a search for real. Both browsers are capable of turning up entries that contain those four letters in that order, at some point. But right away, I see the difference: Firefox pulled up 13 items and Chrome only 12, from the same bookmarks file.
What's the extra bookmark? It's an item called "Simple Regression Page," which produces a line of a graph that best fits a set of variable conditions. The letters "real" don't appear in that page's title whatsoever, so why did Firefox pull it up? Because "real" appears deep in the page's URL. Since the title page of a Web site may not actually contain the title of the site (it's been known to happen), and a URL is presumably more likely to contain that title, Firefox's bookmark system searches both entries simultaneously.
However, Chrome 3 did pull up "RCP," which was my abbreviation for RealClearPolitics.com as it appears on my links bar. It didn't have "real" in its bookmark title, though it does appear in the URL. But not deep in the URL, as was the case with the Simple Regression Page.
When Firefox first pulled up 13 entries and Chrome 12, I wanted to know right away, which one was the odd man out? The easiest way for me to figure out would be to click on the Name bar at the top -- usually that sorts by name. And for Firefox, it does. Would you believe you can't sort bookmarks in Chrome 3; they can only appear in the retrieval space in the same order as they appear in the bookmarks list? You can click the Name bar in Chrome 3 until you've worn a hole in your mouse; it's not going to do anything.
Now, you have to wonder, how long has this obvious omission remained in Chrome -- a sort button that doesn't sort? Hasn't anyone reported this? Isn't the purpose of beta testing to find problems so they may then be remedied?
Or perhaps it's the purpose of Google's support forums to help users grieve and come to terms with omitted features. Here is a support thread topic header from December 2008: "There is no way to sort bookmarks in the bookmarks folder. By name, by most recent, or otherwise." There are dozens of responses to this complaint -- a litany of comments, all of them from Chrome users only, the final one in the set having been posted last May 10.
That entry contains a link to a Chrome plug-in -- quite literally, an independent British programmer last April created the bookmark sorter that Google neglected to include with its own browser.
To recap: In less time than it takes an entire corporation, using what is purported to be an open programming process, to re-insert a feature that has been an historical component of a competitive browser (which, by the way, is actually produced by some of the very same people, so they would have intimate knowledge of that component), a theology student in Monmouth, in his spare time in-between running a youth Bible study group and building motorsports racing simulations, comes up with a plug-in that, at least for some users, fills that feature gap. What is wrong with this picture?
Next: Can Chrome fight back with a versatile address bar?
Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Linux from Fileforum now.
Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Windows from Fileforum now.
At this point, Google might answer that users will probably prefer to search for long, lost bookmarks through Chrome's address bar. That particular tool does show some "real" capabilities, beginning with asking the user whether she wants to search for what she's typing (which obviously doesn't begin with http://) using her default search engine. Maybe real/ is a directory entry, and that shows up as possibility #2. Then three selections from the bookmarks database comes up, and these are plainly marked with gold stars, to distinguish them from sites you may never have seen before. Follow that up with a likely partial URL match, then a menu entry that takes you to a history page. That page is quite impressive, including pages recently buffered whose contents (not just their titles or URLs) contain the search item in question.
What would make Chrome's address bar perfect for this task is some more breadth in the bookmarks department. As we now know, there are at least 12 entries from bookmarks that Chrome can pull up, but it chose these three. There's no obvious reason why it chose (with apologies to Comcast) the first item with a gold star as the #1 entry, when it could also have pulled up the memorial page to Los Angeles disk jockey The Real Don Steele -- a page where "real" appears earlier in both the title and the URL.
When we try the same test with Firefox 3.5's "Awesome Bar" (a name which sounds more like a confection than a tool), the browser returns a scrollable list (ah, there's that missing element!) with all 13 of its bookmark entries. Now, it didn't offer to search Google for you first, but Firefox's tool isn't designed to be merged with its search box. For me, that's not a minus for Firefox, though others will appreciate Google's merger of the two functions and reclamation of screen space. It also didn't provide partial matches from URLs, which is a nice Chrome feature. And there's no link to history, but if you click the down-arrow to the very right in the address bar (not an obvious feature, I'll grant you), the list will switch from a bookmarks search to a history search, in place.
Usually in a showdown like this, I have to search for those little features and nuances that make one contestant better than the other by just a hair. In this particular instance, Google Chrome didn't even really come to the table with its game face on. If a software company is going to offer a feature, then it needs to be a complete feature, or else it should omit it altogether. Here, Chrome needs to decide whether its purpose is to direct users back to the search engine, or to help users with the functionality they expect to find in a browser, even though bookmarks, I'm told, are oh-so-'90s.
For this heat, score one very decisive round in favor of Firefox, which makes our running score suddenly lopsided: Firefox 3.5 (2), Chrome 3 (0).
Download Firefox 3.5 Final for Linux from Fileforum now.
KEEP SCORE ALONG WITH BETANEWS:
- Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 3 Showdown, Round 1: How private is private browsing?: Firefox 3.5 (1), Chrome 3 (0) after 1 heat
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009