Wednesday 13 October 2010

SharePoint and Chrome - Better Together

I've been using Google's Chrome browser since its first release in 2008; I've loved nearly every second of the experience. Who would've thought there was room left to innovate in the browser space? Chrome's omnibar and rapid-fire JavaScript rendering, among other tweaks, are simply light years ahead of the competition.

While I normally rely on IE for my MOSS/SharePoint editing interactions, as of late I'm making the switch to Chrome in that space as well. What I've found to date has blown my mind.

Yes the MOSS 2007 UI degrades somewhat but it's still very useable. More importantly, Chrome drastically reduces the time it takes to accomplish basic tasks like modifying page content or viewing list data. I'm not saying these are normally slow in SharePoint but they can be in the www.westernaustralia.com environment (it's an ageing site with a lot of content and a lot of customisations); some pages in particular nearly grind to a halt in IE8 with the corresponding process consuming upwards of 1GB of memory the more I interact with the page.

Chrome "fixes" many of these slowdowns I'd previously attributed to the SharePoint environment and gives me all the Chrome goodness I've come to love over the last two years. It almost makes the SharePoint editing experience pleasurable!

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4 comments:

  1. Have you considered using Chrome Frame for IE8?

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  2. @Anonymous: Haven't seen Chrome Frame before--interesting. Implementing it would likely require a change to the admin master page however which gets us into dangerous territory with supportability in MOSS 2007... it would also require users to install the plugin, which might be blocked/require additional privileges in our corporate environment.

    By the sounds of it, the page will render as a Chrome page but within IE... I think I'll just stick to using Chrome directly for now!

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  3. Do you know how to get the WYSISWYG editor in the blogging app in Sharepoint?

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  4. Today I found also that Chrome can automatically login to our Sharepoint intranet site using the windows account, just like IE does (it's called NTLM authetication).

    You just have to add the intranet domain names to the Chrome command line in the startup shortcut's properties:
    --auth-server-whitelist="*.mycompany.com"
    .. and you're good to go!

    ReplyDelete

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