Six days ago, Google took the "beta" tag off its Chrome browser.  Several improvements were announced at the same time.  Still, not many people will claim that Chrome is perfect, and Matt Cutts has gone to the trouble of identifying 10 issues on his blog.

 Matt Cutts

Don’t take this as a sign of friendly fire within Google; Cutts explicitly says that he’s not attacking the Chrome team.  Instead, the post might be better interpreted as a sign of where Chrome could go, since Cutts has a fair amount of clout and his many readers are liable to support his suggestions.

So on to the ideas, of which we’ll just hit the highlights.  First, Cutts wants the escape key to be capable of freezing animated GIFS on a page.  Next, he writes, "Middle-clicking on a tab is a fast, easy way to close tabs.  But it can’t currently be aborted – what if you click your middle button on a tab and then realize that you don’t want to close that tab?  On Firefox you can move your mouse off the tab before releasing the button to abort closing the tab.  That doesn’t work on Chrome right now."

Then Cutts continues, "If I start typing "Google webmaster blog" into the Omnibox, it offers to search Google for "webmaster blog" . . . .  I’m a power user, so I want a way to turn that quicksearch off.  I type a lot of searches of the form [Google X Y Z] but that doesn’t mean I want to search on Google for [X Y Z]."  He feels it would be nice to be able to delete certain suggestions, too.

Volunteer your own recommendations if you’ve got other ideas; Cutts has asked for them, so you won’t be whining.  Then we’ll just wait and see both how and how quickly Chrome gets updated now that it’s out of beta.