RevaHealth.com Blog

Damien has put together this article about why he dislikes Google Chrome:

Likemany web developers I was both excited and slightly frustrated with the arrival of Google’s Chrome rowser last year. My excitement was due to it being a browser built by Google, (who did a great job with mail) using the very successful WebKit application framework. The reason I was slightly frustrated was that it created more work for me, being another browser platform I would have to test my web apps on! My first look at RevaHealth.com on Chrome left me very impressed. The layout was perfect; due to the use of the ebKit I’m sure. The speed at which it loaded was impressive too, due to their new Javascript engine. Unfortunately it was after my initial impression that the problems began.

Chrome is fast due to its clever caching system. It is very good in general, but not if the page is changing on a regular basis. Several times I have viewed a page, made a change and clicked refresh, only to find the change hasn’t been implemented. It takes several refreshes. This is common with most browsers but Chrome takes much longer to recognize a change.

Another issue occurs with the forward/ back functionality. RevaHealth.com uses a Jquery history Plugin to manage the history changes for our dynamic pages. Simply put, almost all click events that make an Ajax Call, add their change to the hash part of the URL. There is a Javascript function that fires every 10 milliseconds to check if this hash value has changed. It works well on most browsers but not
all of the time in Chrome.

One very annoying bug that we found when using Chrome was what we dubbed the ‘double flash’ bug, whereby our splash screen was displayed and removed twice in a row, very fast, making it look like it was flashing. We first discovered this when we clicked on the same link twice. We got around this by checking that the link was not already in effect.

The next bug wasn’t discovered for a while, Chrome seems to gets to a point where it gets stuck and causes the ‘double flash’ bug. Once hit, every click causes this ‘double flash’ and nothing changes, leaving the site unusable. The point where the double flash occurs is very random, making locating the problem very
difficult. After much time spent investigating, we found that it seems to be an overlap, whereby the history change function is hit twice, causing it to undo the click the user just made.

However,it looks like my prayers have been answered, as Google have launched the new Chrome Beta which doesn’t seem to cause these problems at all! But perhaps it will have a few issues of its own…