It’s taken a while, but I’ve managed to use Google Chrome nearly exclusively for quite a few days now. I say “nearly” because unfortunately, Chrome is not yet available on Mac OS X and I’ve been forced to use it in Parallels, on Boot Camp as well as on other people’s computers. There will be a version for Chrome coming for Mac soon, but for now it’s Windows only. The good news is that Chrome worked quite well in every way I could use it.
The first thing to keep in mind is that Chrome, along with just about every other Google product/service that isn’t the search engine, is in beta and according to Google themselves is “far from done.” Although, keeping up with Google’s other beta releases, you’re unlikely to run into too many problems unless you’re a real power user. It’s refreshing, but makes it surprising when Chrome can hitch once in a while.
In terms of design, Chrome seems to borrow heavily from Opera, which put me off a bit, but actually made me appreciate the ideas of the URL bar below the tab design a bit more. Google seems to have put a lot of effort into making Chrome stand out from your other applications. The window itself is made to look similar to a Vista window without Aero, which makes it looks nicer and might draw in the average user and some “power users” (I must admit that it drew me in as a Mac user that also uses XP).
One thing Google is pushing heavily in Chrome is that each tab acts as its own process, including flash and javascript. It does live up to its promise, though there have been times that the entire browser froze for a few seconds for me, though that may have been from other processes running at the same time. The only time I experienced an issue was when I had first downloaded it, opened Amazon and YouTube, closed the Amazon tab and the images from it appeared in the YouTube page. Otherwise the tabs seem work well, with maybe a few hitches but nothing too significant or continuous.
The Omnibar has also been mentioned a lot, both with it’s tendency to send your browsing data to Google and its ease of use. Start typing in a URL, and if its one of the million top visited sites, the Omnibar will know what it is and recommend it for you. The Omnibar can also search Google automatically, orb you can it can save any other site’s search to search on that site, which is quite useful if you really just want to search on Amazon, or maybe even Gadgetell. Some privacy nuts might want to turn these features off if they don’t want Google knowing what websites they visit or things they search for.
There are other minor features of Google Chrome that some other browsers but adds them all together. The Omnibar highlights the main URL while greying out the rest of the URL to make the actual website more obvious to see. Incognito mode lets you browse the web with saving any of the data, especially useful if you’re visiting sites that you don’t want others knowing you’ve visited. The ability to save links to webapps and view them in a window without the Omnibar is nice, if a tad useless to some people.
Overall, Google Chrome is a step in the right direction, and if it keeps up with where it’s rendering engine, WebKit, is going, ti should be a valuable replacement to Firefox, especially if it adds a lot of extensions like Firefox. It might not be ready for a main browser yet, but it is certainly a worthy secondary browser until it comes out of bets.
Gadgetell Rating: 7.5/10
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