Google's Chrome, impressions and thoughts
There are a ton of reviews on Google's Chrome browser out on the web. Anybody care for a Tech Outfit perspective? We take the browser through the paces and compare it against what we use for our day-to-day browsing habits. Will Chrome be good enough to replace our tried and true Firefox? Will Google shape the way we look at web pages?
First Impressions
I prefer to operate in a Linux desktop but have recently picked up an Acer Aspire One laptop loaded with Windows XP Home. Google's Chrome browser is currently written for Windows only with Mac OS X and Linux ports coming eventually. I downloaded installed and launched the browser.
The first thing that I noticed is that the user interface does not take cues from your overall Windows theme. A color I will call Google Blue invades the title bar letting you know you're definitely using a Google product.
Aside from the initial color and UI shock, Chrome interestingly uses the otherwise wasted title bar space for tabbed browsing. I'm a bit of a screen real-estate crusader which is especially important on the Aspire One's 1280x600 screen so I keep my Firefox crammed into one toolbar and will often jump to full screen mode. Chrome gets a slight leg up on screen real-estate by utilizing that toolbar. If I could shrink the address bar down a bit there would be a significant difference.
The default page for Chrome is a nifty beast that shows screenshots of your most visited websites, recent bookmarks and a search box for your history. This has been covered in great detail in other reviews so I will not dig any further on that subject.
I had heard many people speak to the speed of Chrome and didn't expect a vast improvement over my fine-tuned Firefox. I fired up Chrome next to Firefox and compared loading a number of simple and complex pages. Chrome definitely has a noticeable speed improvement, especially in Javascript-heavy and other media-heavy sites. The browser really feels snappy.
Overall I'm content with the performance of Firefox but one thing I've always noticed is that with a few complex sites open, adding a new tab isn't as instant as I would like. To compare, I opened up a number of complex news sites in Google and kept opening new tabs while the pages were loading. The new tabs opened just as fast as the first tab. Very impressive.
One page I really wanted to compare that I was unable was my Zimbra mail client. This webmail client makes very heavy use of AJAX and takes a little while to load in Firefox and IE. Unfortunately it fell back to the Standard HTML version when attempting to login so I was unable to compare. I imagine this has something to do with the application detecting the browser type and at this point it is unsure if Chrome has the capabilities it needs.
Thoughts
With a very impressive first release is it enough to pull Firefox away from my default browser setting? No. Here's why:
I prefer to operate in a Linux desktop but have recently picked up an Acer Aspire One laptop loaded with Windows XP Home. Google's Chrome browser is currently written for Windows only with Mac OS X and Linux ports coming eventually. I downloaded installed and launched the browser.
The first thing that I noticed is that the user interface does not take cues from your overall Windows theme. A color I will call Google Blue invades the title bar letting you know you're definitely using a Google product.
Aside from the initial color and UI shock, Chrome interestingly uses the otherwise wasted title bar space for tabbed browsing. I'm a bit of a screen real-estate crusader which is especially important on the Aspire One's 1280x600 screen so I keep my Firefox crammed into one toolbar and will often jump to full screen mode. Chrome gets a slight leg up on screen real-estate by utilizing that toolbar. If I could shrink the address bar down a bit there would be a significant difference.
The default page for Chrome is a nifty beast that shows screenshots of your most visited websites, recent bookmarks and a search box for your history. This has been covered in great detail in other reviews so I will not dig any further on that subject.
I had heard many people speak to the speed of Chrome and didn't expect a vast improvement over my fine-tuned Firefox. I fired up Chrome next to Firefox and compared loading a number of simple and complex pages. Chrome definitely has a noticeable speed improvement, especially in Javascript-heavy and other media-heavy sites. The browser really feels snappy.
Overall I'm content with the performance of Firefox but one thing I've always noticed is that with a few complex sites open, adding a new tab isn't as instant as I would like. To compare, I opened up a number of complex news sites in Google and kept opening new tabs while the pages were loading. The new tabs opened just as fast as the first tab. Very impressive.
One page I really wanted to compare that I was unable was my Zimbra mail client. This webmail client makes very heavy use of AJAX and takes a little while to load in Firefox and IE. Unfortunately it fell back to the Standard HTML version when attempting to login so I was unable to compare. I imagine this has something to do with the application detecting the browser type and at this point it is unsure if Chrome has the capabilities it needs.
Thoughts
With a very impressive first release is it enough to pull Firefox away from my default browser setting? No. Here's why:
- There are a number of Firefox extensions that I would rather not do without.
- Access to my AJAX-rich Zimbra account is a definite show-stopper.
- While it makes excellent use of screen real-estate, there is no full-screen mode for those situations where I just want a little more.
- I would like to see the browser have a more native-look, although I could overlook this if other features were in place
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