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1. Comment - Google Chrome 4: Yes, it's fast, but is it usable?

   (Nov 7, 2009 - 1:48 PM)

   As a Chromium developer, I'm utterly boggled by this article. You accuse us of not having a clue, and cite as evidence that only in Chrome 4 are we testing a bookmarks bar and a home button. The bookmark bar (not just on the new tab page, but everywhere) and home button have both been available since the initial Chrome 0.2 beta release last September.
   
   On extensions, I'm not sure what you're trying to say, precisely, but it sounds like you think that all there is for Chrome are themes. It shouldn't be a surprise that there is more focus on themes than extensions when themes were part of Chrome 3 and extensions are part of Chrome 4, but themes are mostly hosted at Google and the third-party extension sites I've seen have generally been focused on extensions, so I'm not sure which sites you were visiting when you missed all of them.
   
   Besides these complaints, the only ones I can find are that we don't have history and bookmarks sidebars. Perhaps it would surprise you to know that we look at automated usage metrics, usability studies, and user problems and questions to gauge what works and what doesn't, and these things aren't things that bug most of our users. In fact, your conclusion that Chrome is "gaining" a reputation for being feature-free is the exact opposite of what we see, where this point of view was prevalent at the time of the initial public launch and has steadily become scarcer.

2. Comment - Google Chrome 2 is 20% faster than Chrome 1 in physical speed tests

   (May 24, 2009 - 12:16 AM)

   Is there somewhere that a Google spokesperson used "update tracks" (except perhaps as another name for the various update channels)?
   
   What I mean by this is that I'm less confused by your use of the word "tracks" as by your application of it to the milestone 1 series builds (1.x, which were up until recently shipping in the stable channel) and the milestone 2 series builds that have been in the dev channel for about five months, beta for two, and just arrived in stable. You seemed to be describing a different versioning process than I'm familiar with.

3. Comment - Google Chrome 2 is 20% faster than Chrome 1 in physical speed tests

   (May 23, 2009 - 12:24 AM)

   Another comment -- as a Chromium developer I don't understand your comments (in this article or previous) about "track 1" and "track 2" at all. There aren't "two development tracks". There is one development track, releases of which trickle down through three distinct update channels as they are found to be more stable. Major version numbers are not a big deal in Chromium development and simply indicate a milestone of collected work -- as of this writing the Chromium trunk already reads "3.x" because milestone 2 has been stabilized and work is now proceeding on the next milestone. These builds will first go to Dev channel users, then Beta, then Stable. I'm not sure what you mean by "officially under development and not yet feature-complete" -- no browser I've ever seen is "feature complete" or not under development (save IE's sad lag after IE 6), and the Chromium code is no exception. You act as if the versioning system is somehow misleading users but this is the first place I have seen such confusion.

4. Comment - Google Chrome 2 is 20% faster than Chrome 1 in physical speed tests

   (May 23, 2009 - 12:13 AM)

   Is there a page that lists the precise tests conducted and how they are combined into a final score?
   
   It seems a bit disingenuous to pooh-pooh the V8 benchmark as biased but then include in your suite Apple's SunSpider benchmark, which must certainly face the same conflict-of-interest questions. Perhaps simply including both, as both are public tests with source code available to all browser makers, would be the most fair.