What do you think of Google Chrome?
Has anyone tried installing/using Google Chrome yet?
If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, then where have you been the past week? Anyway, the short answer would be that Chrome is a new ‘open source‘ web browser from Google.
Game of Simon anyone?
Personally, I really quite like it. It’s bloomin’ quick for starters. To blind you with some geeky factoids - on my PC, the Sunspider JavaScript browser test benchmarked Chrome about 49% faster than Firefox 3 and a whopping 925% quicker than IE7. Wowzers.
Other than the speed, Chrome is quite pretty to look at and work with. You can play about with Tabs, drag them around or quickly create new windows out of them, plus the barebones feel to the whole thing maximises the web page screen area.
It’s not all good though, the ‘Omnibox’ (which combines a search engine query box and the location bar) whilst very good, could still do with a bit more work. I’d prefer it to favour pages I’ve visited before a lot more heavily than it currently does. I mean, suggesting websites or search engine queries that only partially match what I’ve typed is all well and good, but since most of the stuff I look at on the internet is from websites that I’ve been to before, it would be more helpful to me if page titles and urls of pages in my history were given priority - chances are that’s where I’ll be going again.
The Find (ctrl+f) feature also sucks badly - any words that appear in a Textarea on the page for instance just aren’t included in the Find, which I find incredibly annoying. It’s also a major pain if you’ve got multiple tabs open and you accidently try to close the browser. IE7 or Firefox 3 would give you an “are you’re sure?” prompt box, whereas Chrome just closes everything no questions asked. There are also a few sites, like Microsoft Hotmail (shock, horror there) that don’t currently support Chrome - which is a bit of a bugger.
Anyway, I expect most/all of those creases will get ironed out pretty soon, after all, it is only the first (beta) version we’re talking about here, and once they add in a few more features like Plugins, I might even switch to Chrome permanently.
Give it a whirl if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think of it…
Got it running on my PC at work and it does seem faster and less cluttered… but I still like my IE7.