Google Chrome - My Thoughts
As you probably know, Google have released a beta of their contender for the browser wars crown called Google Chrome. I’ve been using Chrome for a few hours now so I thought I’d give my hastily-formed opinion of what I think so far.
Chrome has a nice straightforward and fast install, it picks up your IE or Firefox bookmarks along with browsing history and passwords based on which browser you have as default (you can import from another browser after install if you need to) which is a nice touch.
The first thing you notice after installing is how slick it looks, it has a very minimalist, google-like look to it which you’ll either love or hate. At first glance though it doesn’t look particularly different to IE7 or Firefox 3 though. But it does do a few things differently.
It has tabs along the title-bar which can be re-arranged and dragged into new windows (by dragging into the page) with ease. It has a home page which has taken the Opera “Speed Dial” idea of having your most visited sites a click away and tweaked it a little, having recent search boxes along with recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs.
The address bar, or “Omnibox” as google are calling it, takes the “Awesomebar” idea of Firefox 3 and tweaks it a bit. It’s very similar but it has a nifty search capturing ability. As you use various search boxes, say Amazon, you can do a search from there in future simply by typing A and then using Tab-complete and typing a search query. Quick and nifty.
The page rendering is pretty good, it uses the Webkit renderer and has a pretty good Acid3 standards test score of 77/100 which beats IE8 Beta 2’s 21/100 and Firefox 3’s 71/100.
It has some neat under-the-hood features too, like each tab being a seperate process meaning if a page crashes it won’t take the whole browser down with it. It’s also exceptionally memory efficient. It also has a turbo-speed javascript engine along with built in Google Gears support, making webapps like gmail much more responsive.
Everythings not quite rosy though. It’s bookmarks implementation feels half-finished, there is no efficient way to mass-organise bookmarks, having to move or edit them one at a time, no tags support either. And figuring out how to access them isn’t exactly intuitive either. Which is surprising as honestly, Bookmarks are perhaps the most used feature in a browser.
Joanne also found an odd bug with facebook where it was appending a url onto the existing url rather than replacing it causing following links to stop for obvious reasons. Despite doing the same things in Firefox/IE working as intended. But, it is beta so this kind of thing is excused, we reported it like good beta testers. 
Overall, I’m very impressed, it feels faster to me on my machine than Firefox 3 which is great, FF3 isn’t exactly a slouch. I’ve had no issues with any sites so far (bar the facebook url issue) and it just feels nice to me.
It’ll be interesting to me to see where Google take this, it definitely has potential. I can see IE users flocking to it readily, as performance wise it’s no contest, hardcore Firefox users who rely on a multitude of plugins perhaps not so readily although that may change depending how the plugin situation matures with Chrome.
Tags: browser, chrome, firefox, internet explorer
