I’m disappointed.

First, they keep touting the new, all HD UI. I’m not sure why the Series3 didn’t get a fully HD UI, and I would have hoped that it would get the new one pushed to it. But no. And one reason I’ve heard is that the existing TiVos don’t have the horsepower to push the new UI, as it’s been entirely implemented in Flash.

Now, I can understand the allure of developing the UI in Flash: there are good tools for Flash; it’s easy to find developers with Flash experience; Flash is mature; and there’s a lot of content on the web, particularly video, in Flash. But if your installed base’s devices can’t run the UI because it’s so resource-intensive, is it a good choice? I’d say no. And it’s not like you can’t make a good UI with other technology. The Boxee box has a great looking UI in a small package. Anyway, perhaps this explains why the TiVo Search beta and the Netflix apps on the current TiVos is so terribly slow.

So the new experience requires a new box. My TiVo’s been making a clicking sound which I assume is the hard drive. I was just hoping it lived at least long enough to see the release of the new stuff. So what else do you get over the Series3 for the money?

Sadly, it doesn’t appear like you get much. The storage options are still pathetic for the cost of the device: 320 GB in the $300 model. The emphasis on the Premiere’s internet content is all well-and-good, but you have to buy a $90 adapter to get WiFi. Even on the $500 model! WTF?

“Hey,” I initially thought, “that remote looks cool.” The one with a keyboard that slides out to help with all that searching you’re going to be doing in the fancy new interface. Turns out it’s not in the box, either, but will be an extra add-on. Fuck. Oh, and Engadget says it’s not well-built (at least the pre-production model they had their hands on).

It doesn’t have any new two-way cable box functionality, so there’s still no on-demand or other tight integration with your cable company’s content. No gain there. Same number of tuners. No gain there. I’m not finding anything to get excited about.

There’s one small bright spot in all this: they’re offering a discount to existing TiVo owners, so I can get the $300 box for $230 or the $500 box for $400. That’s better than a kick in the teeth, but I think I’ll still stick with my Series3 until it dies or until the price on this new series drops to something reasonable and I can get more storage along with the upgrade.

TiVo should see that decision as a loss. I’m definitely the target market for their $500 box, and I’m sticking with my 5-year-old one instead, because it does most of what the new one does. Like I said: disappointing.

Now I just have to keep the forum for 1password open in a tab and go there daily, looking for the better 1password integration. At least they say it’s coming, and they’ve always been good in the past on delivering on their promises. Really, it’s the only thing that even makes me think of using Safari right now.

Plenty has been written on Google’s Chrome browser (for the Mac in my case), so I don’t intend to re-tread that ground. However, I’ve always spent time with new browsers that are released and have always gone back to Safari after awhile. This time, coming back to Safari from Chrome, was the first time ever that I’ve actually missed the other browser. So I thought I’d jot down some of my impressions of the experience and how it compares to my status quo of Safari.

A lot of people talk up Chrome’s performance relative to whatever browser they were using, usually Firefox or IE. I don’t find Chrome to be faster than Safari in any subjective way, and I didn’t test it. I also didn’t find it to be particularly more stable—I had a few tabs crash in the course of a month in Chrome and only one time did Chrome ever wedge itself to where I had to quit it altogether. That seems about on par with Safari in my experience. That said, one place where Chrome did outshine Safari was memory usage. With a full complement of tabs, with Flash blocked, Chrome uses less memory just sitting there in the background than does Safari. Safari seems to love allocating and holding on to memory for some reason, which is annoying.

I found that when I first moved to Chrome, I would instinctively hit tab to search, since Safari’s location bar doesn’t double as a search entry field as it does on Chrome (and Firefox). This time, I had stayed with Chrome for more than a month, and not tabbing over became a habit that I’m forced to break again as I go back, and I’m finding that I prefer Chrome’s behavior even though I was initially annoyed at the location bar’s multipurpose nature.

There are a small number of things that I missed from Safari when I was using Chrome full-time: a proper, full-featured 1password integration; shortcuts and contextual menus to look words up in a dictionary from the browser; full-sized “chrome” bar at the top to drag the browser window with; and the excellent ClickToFlash plug-in.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s ironic that two of the items are plug-ins, which Chrome now officially supports but require hacky workarounds to implement in Safari, that are currently in Safari’s favor. I am certain that it’s just a sign of Safari’s relative maturity that this is the case, and that Chrome will exceed Safari very shortly in this regard. In fact, two plug-ins I enjoyed on Chrome (one for Google Voice integration and another for Gmail integration) are Chrome-specific, and although I’m sure there are similar ones for Safari, the unofficial nature of plug-ins on Safari make me keep them to a minimum.

But 1password is dear to my browsing experience, and the integration in Chrome is alpha-quality, by the authors’ admission. I have Safari remember and autofill nothing—no names, passwords, form-fields, nothing—instead using 1password to fill passwords, identities in web forms, etc. 1password is great at that on Safari, and barely passable at just filling passwords on Chrome. I’m happy to have had that bare minimum though, for I wouldn’t have bothered with Chrome without it. ClickToFlash has a functional equivalent on Chrome, although I find the excellent Safari plug-in to be superior.

The tabs-on-top UI of Chrome is frustrating. I remember that the Safari 4 beta did the same thing, but for some reason I don’t recall, it didn’t bother me the way it does with Chrome. I find that in Chrome, I’m frequently grabbing a tab and dragging it around instead of grabbing the window and moving it on the desktop. Annoying.

Despite these nits, this is the first time that I’m back in Safari, and instead of feeling like I’m back at home after a time away, I find that I’m missing Chrome. I think that when Chrome gets some more mature extensions, particularly a great 1password plug-in, I will give it another try. It just might stick.