Chrome Browser Review
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008So the new Google Chrome browser became available yesterday amid a lot of speculation as to how good it is. So how good is it? I downloaded it last night as soon as it became available and installed it on my XP-64 machine. My first reaction was a little confusion as to where bookmarks were added and accessed, but it is actually far simpler than I had imagined and very convenient to perform these actions. The tabs fitted nicely along the top and the speed of startup, loading new tabs and traversing them was very fluid. Amazingly, I noticed little in the way of compatibility issues with other browsers. I have been used to dealing with the eternal Firefox/IE battle when designing websites, but I was surprised at how few bugs I found on this browser. I did notice one or two javascript anomalies which I will notify Google about, but on the whole, an excellent job has been done by the Google engineers.
The browser does start up fast, but the speed improvement I was expecting did not materialse. I am hoping this will be ironed-out over the coming months and we can start to see the full benefit of this innovative browser.
I was a die-hard Firefox fan beforehand, but in one fell swoop, I suspect Google may have displaced the competition.
Yes, there will be issues with Chrome, but it is open source and that counts for a lot. Give it time and you could see this browser really taking off. IE8 is trying to compete and itself has a few innovations which may compete or even slightly surpass Chrome; however I am off the opinion that making Chrome open source will effectively force the other browsers creators to take note and improve their own offerings.