My First Chrome Experience

My inbox has been flooded with emails asking me to blog about my opinion of Chrome. That is if you consider "flooded" to be one more than zero. And you include the email I sent to myself from work as a reminder to give it a shot...

Ok fine. No one asked. And even less likely care. But guess what, you're getting it anyway.

What I liked...

The download is a wonderfully small 475 KB. The same cannot be said for either IE or Firefox.

I was impressed with how quickly Chrome opened for me. Both IE and Firefox take between 3 and 5 seconds to load on my Vista machine. Chrome however opens instantly.

One feature that sticks out is the default home page. Rather than a search page like Firefox or that bloated MSN page from IE, you get a slick UI with personalized content on it. The "Most visited" site section is reminiscent of the XP and Vista start menu's listing of most commonly used applications. And having bookmarks displayed is also a nice touch.

Overall I'd have to say that Chrome is very quick and responsive. Pages render quickly and (from my limited testing) without any major issues.

What I didn't...

One major flaw in my view is that the default home page, while innovative, lacks any control over what gets displayed. If you search Monster regularly for example then it is going to show up on your home page. While convenient in some circumstances, imagine your manager walking past your desk and seeing a screen shot of Monster at the top of your list. And I've been told that some people have been known to use the net for more "adult" activities. Wouldn't that go over well when you open your browser during your quarterly sales presentation.... 

As a research project Chrome has some real value. If the benchmarks they present are accurate they have made some major improvements to JavaScript processing. But they are talking about it in much grander terms than just a research project. They seem to be positioning it as a first-class browser to replace IE, Firefox and the rest.

I'm still not sure why I should care. I've never felt an overwhelming desire to get a new browser. I use Firefox and IE and find very little difference between the two. I don't really see what market need Google is trying to fill here.

13 Comments

  • I'm sadly impressed at how fast, clean and pretty it is... I'll be glad to see how Microsoft responds. IE is currently my favorite browser (I like it about 100 times better than FireFox), but Chrome is even simpler in the amount of clutter that is taken up... it's so pretty...

  • " imagine your manager walking past your desk and seeing a screen shot of Monster at the top of your list. And I've been told that some people have been known to use the net for more "adult" activities. Wouldn't that go over well when you open your browser during your quarterly sales presentation.... "

    That's why there's the incognito mode -- the equivalent of the "InPrivate" in the next IE (haven't tried it yet, but read about it).

    I've been using it for many hours already and without problems. The one thing that bugs me is that clicking the wheel button on the mouse doesn't allow me to scroll. I hope they add this in the future.

    Other than this I really enjoy how fast everything is. It's actually faster than Opera, which is quite an accomplishment. Also, switching between tabs is absolutely instantaneous, the way it should be. Also nice is that I can detach a tab and make a separate window and put it back.

    There are some sites on the web that are quite painful to use with IE as they are too slow. Not a problem with Chrome.

    I'm not 100% sold just yet, I need to visit some more sites and see how well they render, but so far it's quite impressive. I will still test my sites with IE/FF, but for personal browsing I may use this new toy as well.

  • Found my first complaint: No Java (not that I care about Java... but I can't play Chess on Pogo.com without it)!

    Also, the scroll-wheel thing as mentioned by Peter above.

  • This browser interface is very similar to Opera browser :)

  • The download is 0.5+7.7MB, during installation files are downloaded.

  • If check the options, you will see that you can set a 'regular' home page, just like any other browser... you can also add the Home button to the bar if you like.

  • Our RIA tests regarding IE8, FF3.1 and Chrome.
    I share in your sadness, we invested a great deal into IE from 2002... We were faithful and committed and our fantastic IE6.0 application just died on IE7 and when we fixed it IE8 just gave our IE love the final stab in the back...
    It's out of my capabilities to understand how Microsoft could lose the browser battle that - despite all forecasts on the planet - he won in less then 4 years. In 2005 IE had 98% penetration.

  • To get in Pogo just use backdoors, it works. Or invite
    yourself into a room. Only way I can use Chrome on Pogo.

  • I dont understand why people gets so afraid of Chrome taking 100% of market share...I know for sure that it doesnt run several heavy web app, and gets stuck in others...despite all babble over the super mega jscript engine (V8)!

  • I just downloaded an update to Chrome and Pogo works.

  • But...all the POGO game windows that I tried open up about an inch short. I have to stretch them down an inch or so.

  • ""Most visited" site section is reminiscent of the XP and Vista start menu's listing of most commonly used applications."

    This feature is just like Speed Dial in Opera :)
    I think Google has copied many features from Opera :(
    also the user interface resembles Opera

  • I havent been able to play pogo bowl for weeks now on windows internet exployer.

    I tried firefox, same thing.

    I keep getting page saying java not found or not working.I checked and it is working.

    Chrome claims to have java v8.

    Would it be worth a try to use chrome and see if it works?

    glenn

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