Google - Stop Annoying Me

I've just spotted something annoying with the Google search and the search direct from Chrome... You search from www.google.come and your results come up, and the bar is there at the top of the page to let you search again...

It has been like this for years, and I'm used to it, I'm used to seeing this search result format and the bar next to "GOOGLE" there with the blue search again button... And I'm positive that I used to get this exact page if I just performed a search from the browser bar as well...

That is, rather than going to google itself and putting the search term into the page, I put the search term as my web address in the browser and it automatically assumed I meant to search for that phrase and gave me the same results...

The point here being I could get to the results and also quickly see to search again...

But I notice today the page has subtly changed:

The result when you search directly from the browser bar is a different page, the same results are shown... But the page is different, and at first I could not see how to refine my search term, because my brain is wired from years of use that the address bar is now not going to be used... You use the provided search term bar inside the page... 

Just like you get from the first style of search...

So I was fumbling and groping for how to actually redefine my search term on this new result page.

It really highlighted to me the change had slipped in, that it is a stealth change, and god I hate google for annoying me with stealth changes, it really annoys me when they do it.

Chrome Tabs Not Browsing

So, I'm having a few recurrant problems with Chrome.  After browsing for a while (and there seems to be no set pattern to this) suddenly I'll right click and "open in new tab" a link, but it'll come up as a blank new tab.  No actual HTTP retrieval seems to go off.

I've had this before and resorted to removing Chrome from my machine and reinstalling it, however, it seems to be getting more and more frequent, and alarmingly so.  Its happens on two different Vista machines, a Kubuntu virtual machine (running in VMWare Player) and on a Ubuntu machine.

All were running stock download and installs of Chrome from Google, there were no plug-ins - except maybe flash - but I was not using video at the time.  And suddenly I can open no links in new tabs... we're not even talking a lot of tabs, just one or two and kaput no more browsing.

The weird thing is though that in any tab already open, showing a page/content, I can still left click to move into and out of hyper links to new pages, and they still load.

I've  had this problem whilst typing into google.com, yahoo mail, msn, this very blogger site (which is a google site underneith) and also whilst using amazon, play and the BBC.  There really is no pattern to when it goes, but once its gone I have to close all open instances of Chrome, all of them, even pages supposedly on other pages in other copies... and I have to open a whole new fresh copy of the browser.

The version of Chrome I've experienced this in is 1.2.0.742.112.

Ironically, I've just tried to report this bug through the Chromium project site... and not been able to.... so I'm going to file it with a fresh install of Firefox in a moment.