It has been a long time since I had last considered using an alternative browser to Safari. But when I got my hands on Google Chrome for Mac – My browser world was shaken.

Appearance

My grudge about Chrome on Windows was the ugly blue colour they chose. I love blue, but I don’t want a blue browser, that just doesn’t make sense. Thankfully the Mac version does away with the ugly blue and introduces the beautiful Mac chrome they all we love so very much. Although not the prettiest style, the tabs work very well sitting on top of the address bar as attempted by Apple in the Safari 4 Beta. The only difference is Chrome has enough space to drag the window separately to the tabs – Apple attempted to have all as one, which failed miserably. The address bar, bookmarks and navigation buttons aren’t anywhere near as nice as Safari and Firefox 3, but Google aren’t exactly known for their brilliant design skills. Google Chrome also has themes so if you don’t like the look, just change it.

Speed

Wow. They’re not lying when they say Google Chrome is the fastest browser ever. It is noticeably faster in all aspects, even compared to Safari. Pages load lightning quick and the javascript speed is brilliant. New tabs open virtually instantly and moving tabs around is a breeze. CPU usage is amazingly low which means it won’t hog your computers resources.

Crash Test

Well Chrome does crash a fair bit due to it being in Alpha. But the good thing about it is it’s crash handling. As each tab in Chrome is processed separately, meaning if a tab crashes the rest of the browser will continue to run fine. This is brilliant, now just fix the amount that the tabs are crashing…

Developer Features

As Google Chrome is based on webkit, you get the same developer inspector as in Safari. Anyone who has used Safari’s web inspector will know it is very comprehensive and can easily pin point any problems with your site, javascript or loading. I find it’s much better than Firebug in Firefox. The alpha version however does not allow you to view cookies yet which is a bit of an issue, but this will be introduced before the Beta launch.

Plug-ins

Google Chrome for Mac does not currently support plug-ins, but the plugins I want to talk about are the common plugins that come with the browser, Flash, Silverlight and Quicktime. 1 word, useless. Flash crashes at least once a day, usually more. Silverlight doesn’t even work – not a terrible thing, who uses it anyway? Quicktime barely works, and a lot of the time won’t work at all. This is a big problem for the browser, although it is forgiven as it’s just in Alpha.

Comparison

As I said earlier Google Chrome is a mash of Safari and Firefox. If you took Safari – improve it slightly. Add in things such as the ability to force new windows into tabs automatically (one feature that has been lacking in Safari for sometime), add themes etc. Then take that out of the blender, rework the way tabs are handled and processed, rework the way downloads are handled so you don’t end up with 50 windows open among other things, Google is a clear winner, especially in the Mac market.

Conclusion

Google, why have we had to wait so long for a Mac version, and a version that looks like it’s  a good 6-12 months from Beta? Your browser nothing short of what I’ve always wanted in a browser, yet I can’t really use it every day as it’s too buggy and is missing some crucial features. Most companies these days have caught on to the whole launch Mac + Windows software together, why have you not? I’m not alone on this one, just ask Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

1. Sites

Stay organised with sites. This is the first feature you see when you open Coda. Sites allows you to setup a working directory, FTP account and much more for each site you’re working on. So you can just double click and get connected. By far one of the most valuable features of Coda.

2. Books

What was that code again? You know when you have that mental blank and can’t remember a code for the life of you. With the built in books in coda you have complete references for HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Perfect! Just hit the books tab.

3. Visual CSS Editor

If you work with CSS the visual CSS editor will save you a lot of time. CSS newbies will love it as well as it will make learning CSS a breeze.

To use the CSS editor, select your CSS file (or page that contains the CSS you want to edit) and click the “CSS” tab. To add a new style click the “+ Style” button on the bottom. Easy. All your styles and classes are listed down the left hand side, to edit it’s properties just enter the values in the visual editor.

4. Line Numbering

Error on line 3078..? Where on earth is that? Turn line numbers on in your preferences (Coda -> Preferences) under the Editor tab. Line numbers will show up on the left hand side of your files, you can also use the line numbers to select a whole line or multiple lines among other things.

5. Clips

You know how annoying it is to write the same script over and over? Of course you do, this is where clips comes in. Clips allows you to save a script in an easy to access window where you can double click to quickly insert the script. Brilliant! To show the clips window just click the “Clips” button at the bottom. To add a clip simply click the “+” symbol in the bottom left (not the far left, the one more to the center). Name the script, add the script and you can also add a selection placeholder (the selection cursor will automatically go to this point when the clip is added) when you’re done, click “Save”.

6. Tab triggering (shortcuts)

What if you could just type “html” then hit the tab key and it automatically puts in basic HTML for you?  It’s there, try it. But more than that, you can add tab triggering to any clip you’ve added! This is one of the most time saving tools in Coda. You can assign a tab trigger to a clip by click the “i” next to a clip in the clip window. Down the bottom you will see “click to add tab trigger”, click it, then type your trigger text and hit tab. Once you’re done hit “Save”.

7. Smart Find/Replace

Say you need to find all the pages that contain “<htmll>” because for some reason you mis-typed it then can’t remember which pages you put it in… Firstly, how silly of you. Second, don’t panic, hit Command + F. In the search field type “<htmll>”, in the replace field type “<html>”, then on the left it will have a checkbox “Find in “directoryname“”, tick the checkbox then click “Replace All”. It’ll then find any files with “<htmll>” and replace it with the correct “<html>”. Problem solved!

8. Dragging Images to create the img tag

This is one of those handy little tips that will make life a little easier for you. In the file viewer browse to an image file, click and drag it into a HTML or PHP document and it’ll automatically create the XHTML tag for you!

9. Easy Indenting

If you’re like me, you’re anal about making sure everything is indented perfectly. And for good reason, it makes reading the code easier and helps with fixing mis-closed tags. Coda makes indenting large blocks easy. Select the block of code you wish to indent (or un-indent) and hit “Command” + “]”  (or “Command” + “[“). This will shift the block forward or backward. Truly handy.

10. Plug-ins

The possibilities are endless. Plug-ins allow you to extend Coda’s native power. Visit here and see what useful plug-ins you can find. I’m always using the compression plugins to strip whitespace and comments from my Javascript and PHP.

There is more power under that hood, and this is just a small selection of the power within Coda, visit their developer site to see more tips and tricks along with video tutorials and much more!