Tag Archives: Chrome

Chrome bug: it forgets browsing sessions!

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I just reported my first Chrome bug but it looks like it’s been known for quite some time, unfortunately.


When Chrome is configured to open the home page on startup it forgets any recently opened tabs if you don’t open those pages before you close the browser again. I’m fairly certain it used to do the right thing before and remember those pages but I’m not sure when that behaviour changed.

Unfortunately Firefox does the same thing. Go to History->Restore Previous Session and it will restore the home page in the same circumstances. I’m almost certain that browser did the right thing in a previous release.

If one were pedantic, the previous session was the single homepage tab and not the dozen tabs I had open before my browser was closed but it’s not what I expect. I’ll close my browser down when I’m doing something intensive but then click on a link in Tweetdeck, laugh at a rage comic and close the browser again before I realise my mistake.

The other thing Chrome has changed is when you have multiple windows open. It only shows the recently closed tabs for one of those windows. Open the home page again and you’ll see the “recently closed” link again where you can open tabs from other windows. You can also press ctrl-shift-t to restore closed windows.

If you hadn’t closed many pages before you shut your browser down you can also use the History page to open previously closed pages selectively. Unfortunately that won’t help if you had pages open for days that you just meant to read when you had time but never found the time. I find myself shoving pages into Read It Later just so I can get back to them at my leisure.

I’ve tried a few Chrome extensions that promised to save my browsing sessions but none worked in the way I’ve described. Does such an extension exist?

Ubuntu: ALT TAB between browser windows?

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I’m still using Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, which is saying a lot as I switched back to Gnome within a week or so of the previous release of Ubuntu.

One of the remaining bugbears I had with Unity was the window or task switcher. It was impossible to switch between Chrome browser windows. I had to click on the Chrome icon in the Unity sidebar and select the window I wanted. It felt like Ubuntu had tried to emulate what Windows 7 did with their taskbar, but Windows did it better because the window previews are close to the taskbar.

I’m not the only one to have this problem. You can either change window switcher in CCSM (oh oh, watch out when using CCSM!) or use ALT-`. That character is the tick character which normally sits above the TAB key on UK/English/US keyboards but may be elsewhere on other locales. I now need to get used to it like I did with Mac OS X.

Google Chrome on Linux and Mac

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Google Chrome, the open source browser that recently made headlines, was unfortunately only released for Windows. Linux and <a href="Mac users were left out in the cold.

It was possibly to get the browser working with Wine, but it wasn’t very stable by all accounts. Thanks to CodeWeavers, they have ported the Chromium browser to Linux and Mac OS X and packaged it ready for download on both systems!

First impressions of the Linux version? For some reason my whole screen goes black while a page is loading or when a new tab is opened. I see this in Vice (The C64 emulator) and any movie player other than mplayer so it’s an issue with my setup, not the browser. The fonts in the url bar suck as well, but I’m sure they can be fixed too. My curiousity is sated. CoveWeavers did a great job, but I’m going back to Firefox. (Via Tom)

So today I am pleased to announce that we have shipped freely available versions of Chromium for both the Mac and Linux. Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.