Tarnished Chrome

I used to think very highly of Google's Chrome browser.  It developed a reputation for being a lightning fast, standards compliant browser, and it was one of the first -- if not the first -- browsers to auto-upgrade users to the latest release.

But recently, I have been finding myself more frustrated with Chrome than Internet Exploder Explorer.

Among the issues I've run into recently:

• If you have a HTML form with a GET action, but no input elements, the browser appends a "?" to the action URL.  There are a few different bugs logged with Chrome and with WebKit on this issue.  Many web sites will accept this extra character without complaint, but some sites with naive redirect rules get rather cranky when this happens.
• Chrome's handling of popup windows makes my brain hurt.  I thought the purpose of popup blockers was to not load content in the first place.  Because of how they handle popups, JavaScript code cannot determine when a popup succeeded or failed, because it always succeeds, even when it fails.  Ouch!
• Even Chrome Frame is not immune.  There appears to be a food fight between Chrome Frame and Internet Explorer over cookie handling in general, and there may be some corner cases in AJAX handling where cookies are not preserved.
• There is some utterly bizarre issue on Chrome 11 that ships with the B&N Nook that causes AJAX-driven actions to pause for 20 seconds before running during on the 2nd execution.  Across 34 variations of desktop browser and OS and 10 different mobile flavors, no other browser exhibits that behavior.  That's going to be a fun one to track down.

Don't get me wrong, Chrome is still a decent browser.  So far it gives me much less trouble than Internet Explorer, but its stock definitely fell a few points after having to work around these issues.