Note this screenshot from Chrome after an image was inserted into a WordPress post - No re-size handles!

Google Chrome has really let me down tonight. For years, the WordPress community has been noting in the Chrome support forums that they need to patch WebKit (the open source browser engine) in order to allow the resizing of images in the WordPress editor, TinyMCE. You can see in the photo on the right, that if you insert a photo in a post or page using Chrome, you don’t have any drag handles to change the size and width – you have to manually change the width (in pixels) in the image properties.

I could get around that, even though it’s a pain… but it’s a shame because I really admire their vision of having each and every tab in Google be isolated in its own memory space so one errant tab will not take down your whole browser.

Tonight, though, there was no joy to be found in the Google camp for me… I had set up a new post format which I feel will better serve you all – our coveted WPDojo community – and in testing it at each member level I wasted over an hour thinking something was wrong with the site when all the time it was Google Chrome.

I want my time back.

Sadly, this appears to also be a problem with the WebKit engine, because both of these problems exist in Apple’s Safari Browser, which is also built on Chrome.

Here’s the problem: Let’s say you have a membership site where upon clicking a post you want nonmembers to see “X”, and members to see “Y”. If you aren’t logged in and you try to read the post, you will get an error like “you need to sign up or login to see this content.” What’s happening is, once the visitor signs in, if they go to the post again, it gives them the cached content instead of the member content.

The workaround is that upon logging in, the member should clear their browser cache, but who wants to do that every time you visit a site? That’s about as handy as paying for your coffee at Starbucks and then having to rotate your tires in order to get out of the parking lot!

So today, at TheWPDojo, Firefox scores “1″ while Safari/Chrome (really, WebKit) scores a zero. I haven’t the energy to test Internet Explorer on this, but needless to say, I’m going to be toting Firefox’s horn all the more now.

If you run a membership site, or some type of site that has dynamic content like this, have you run into the same problem? Has Chrome given you other headaches you wasted time on before figuring out it was Chrome? Leave a comment.

It may not save a life, but it could save someone some hair and a little blood pressure.