Google Chrome needs polishing

Matt Cutts of Google posted yesterday about the ten things he doesn’t like about Chrome.  Coming from a Google employee, this seems like brave transparency — but Matt’s list is pretty much a collection of nits.  I use Google Chrome as my default browser, and in general I love it — especially its performance.  But I have a few more serious things about Google Chrome that I dislike:

  1. No RSS autodiscovery.  I consume all of my regular sites through feeds, and I like the fact that Firefox (and Opera, and Safari, and even IE7) provide a consistent way to at least find the feed URL for any site that includes an RSS autodiscovery link.  Firefox even lets you customize how to handle subscriptions — mine is set to feed it (pun intended) to FeedDemon — so subscribing to a feed I like is only one click away.  In Google Chrome, there is no button to subscribe, and if I load a URL that contains an RSS feed, it just displays as HTML (ignoring all the RSS tags).  I have to manually copy the URL and paste it into my feed reader.
  2. I know Matt said not to mention it, but lack of cross-platform support is a major deficit.  Eventually Google will get around to releasing versions for MacOS/X and Linux — but what about FreeBSD?
  3. Perhaps the biggest gaping hole is the lack of support for extensions — but hopefully that one will be remedied soon.
  4. Keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to work all the time.  I haven’t narrowed down exactly when, but sometimes Ctrl+T doesn’t open a new tab, and Ctrl+C sometimes doesn’t copy to the clipboard.  In the same contexts, I can select “New Tab” from the wrench menu or “Copy” from the context menu, and they work as expected.  This is a big one for a hater of Mus computerus like me.
  5. Chrome seems to give up on links faster than Firefox (it does everything faster, even fail).  I get a lot more page load failures that are remedied by F5.  It also gives up on linked stylesheets, resulting in an unformatted page until I refresh.  There should be some way to tweak the timeout.  Maybe there is, but I haven’t found it yet.

None of these are show-stoppers for me yet, but if/when I change my main workstation to FreeBSD then #2 will be.

How about you?  If you’ve used Chrome for any length of time, what bugs you about it?