I
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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
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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
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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.