I’ve been a Google Chrome user for nearly two hours now and am likely to be a user for many more hours to come.
There are a few problems though. First off there is no Linux version of Chrome currently (so it’s either Windows or VMware on LInux…). There is also no obvious ability in the version that I downloaded to import bookmarks and preferences from Mozilla Firefox, all I saw was a dialog box for Internet Explorer. **UPDATED** For whatever reason on my install I wasn’t prompted for the Firefox migration, but it is there**
But the thing that matters most to me, that is a browser that just works, is a promise that Chrome delivers. As my first and obvious test case i loaded up the InternetNews.com site which has more than it’s fair share of JavaScript on it. As opposed to IE 8 which had difficulty with the page, Chrome worked flawlessly. In fact, the whole download and install process took less than 4 minutes for me on a test WindowsXP SP3 PC. This blog post is actually being written inside of a Chrome tab too.
It is somewhat disconcerting at first glance to have such a minimalist interface. But then again Google Search itself seemed minimalist in comparison to the bloat that was (and still is) the Yahoo! portal that Google originally powered.
The ‘Incongnito’ Window (aka private browsing or Porn mode) by default opens up as a new browser window, as opposed to a new tab inside of the current window.
The ability to hide history/cookies is a neat one but it doesn’t obscure your history/cookie or your IP from the web sites that you visit. So it’s not quite as Incognito as say running Tor (or Vidalia) and then clearly your cache but hey it’s a start.
The built-in Task manager feature (left) is also kinda neat showing exactly how much memory/cpu each tab is taking.
We’ve all seen our favorite browsers spinning endlessly at one point or another, but we’ve never actually been able to pinpoint (within the browser) the specific culprit.
This is one feature that I’m already totally addicted too (yes i’m a stats nerd).
Talking about ‘interesting’ features, Chrome also has an interesting ‘View Source’ function that opens up the source inside of a separate tab in the browser (instead of a seperate window).Unfortunately I have yet to find a Page Info button that provides the granular detail that Mozilla Firefox 3 provides showing Links/Media usage on any given page. It’s a must have feature that I hope Google will include in future versions of Chrome. **UPDATED* Though Chrome doesn’t have a Page Info button it does have something called ‘Inspect Element’ which is a lot more developer focused (but very useful).**
So my initial 120 minute impression of Google Chrome? Impressive, but there is still work that needs to be done.
