Yesterday Google released their brand-new browser Chrome, but is this the revolutionary browser we have all been waiting for ? I’ve tested this browser for about 10hours now, I’ll discuss a few things about it here.
Lets start with the good things, because there are quite a few. The Chrome browser is designed to give the user as much space as possible to display web content. There is no statusbar, no menubar and no titlebar. Ok, maybe this looks a bit different from what we’re all used to, but in my opinion its a pretty good improvement. For us who use the statusbar ( including me ), don’t panic. Whenever you hover over a link, a small statusbar pops up at the bottom of the browserscreen. This goes for some other actions too, so its not that different from your average browser.
The Chrome layout is fresh, simple and it makes the browser easy to use. There isn’t a flood of information available at first sight, we just focus on the webpage here. History, downloads and favorites are only one click away, there is a possibility to display a favorites-bar too. The options-window is pretty small, it only contains what we really need. Take a look at picture 3 for the layout and favorites.
Its not the lightest browser however, when we look at the stats Google Chrome created for us ( and we can see those in picture 2 ), we see that Opera still has the crown there. Chrome has its own task manager, and statistics page for each tab. It also displays other browsers, if they are running on the host computer. To clearify the statistics on picture 2, I opened the bydust.com mainpage in 5 different browsers, just to see the differences between browsers there.
Pages load faster too, the Google guys didn’t lie about that. Whenever you open a large page, you get the idea that its loaded faster than on whatever browser you’ve used before. Same goes for executing javascript, thats one point more for Google Chrome.
On Chrome’s default start page you can see your most visited websites, including thumbnails. Pretty nice Google, but it would be nicer if we could set our own websites on the quickdial function. Lets hope this will be one of the first plugins released for Google Chrome.
According to Google Chrome shouldn’t freeze or lock up whenever something bad happens in one of its tabs, the problem should be kept in that particular tab. Well, thats a pretty nice idea and it works most of the time, but I’ve had a few freezes already. Mostly its nothing, I close a tab or make a request and the browser freezes for a second, but right before I started writing this review I had to kill the process because it was taking all available CPU recources. I was browsing for an image file, maybe it had a little problem with explorer - I don’t know.
Another “bad” thing about Chrome are the resizable textarea’s. Thats pretty usefull indeed, but whatever you type in those things isn’t shown as it should be. Sometimes parts of words are dissapearing, or a whole sentence vanishes. Its still there, we just don’t see it.
Ok, this must be the longest blogpost ever (from me, that is). Hope this was interesting for you :)
Small edit: after reading Robert Accettura’s blogposts about Google Chrome I thought you guys might find this interesting.
Here are his initial thoughts on Chrome, and the easter egg he discovered.
There are 7 replies to this item:
August 6th, 2009
Anonymous says:
Hi,
First I like your site and works!
Although I am using chrome browser too often but as some commented Google has not complete it yet,
I tried once to over load the tabs collection (say >20 tabs) and in a blink of an eye the browser told that something wrong happened and it should be shut down thats it every thing’s disappeared.
wishing Google all the best and you too James:)
September 21st, 2008
James says:
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs at blackhatbootcamp.com/listofwordpressblogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.
September 8th, 2008
Nick says:
Keeping this up-to-date: Google Chrome also ignores some javascript links/hotspots and image hotspots. It’s impossible to use certain applications on Facebook because of this, for example Friends for Sale.
September 5th, 2008
Nick says:
3rd day I’m using Chrome, must say that it CANNOT work with PDF-files. Each time I open a PDF-file it freezes for a few seconds, and whenever I try to scroll in the pdf it freezes again.
The short freeze when the user closes a tab is also pretty annoying. Lets hope they fix this in the final version.
September 3rd, 2008
Timothy says:
Chrome is really nice for multi-core machines,
given the fact that they spawn a new process (instead of threads in other browsers) for every tab.
Now we have to wait for webdevelopers to start utilizing all that unused power on the clients.
It does leave me with doubts about the overhead in memory usage caused by spawning all those processes…
September 3rd, 2008
Nick says:
Yup, don’t know when they are going to release it for OSX, Linux and others.
Maybe this might be interesting for non-Windows users and developers: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/getting-started
And thank you :))
//edit: yes, I’m using Chrome as primary browser atm. I was using Firefox before, but want to work with this one for a while to discover its good and nasty habits :)
September 3rd, 2008
Ronny says:
Too bad it has only been released for Windows yet.
Are you using it as your primary browser now, or isn’t it just ready yet, for that?
Great review however :)