My Review Of Google Chrome

The internet giant Google has built there own internet browser, so I decided to download it & take a look. Knowing Google, this program might be a good competitor to Mozilla Firefox 3. It’s ‘Each tab is it’s own process’ & ‘Incognito’ features are some of it’s selling points. So has Google made yet another quality product, or have they made a undesirable browser?
I downloaded Chrome from here -
http://www.google.com/chrome


Installation

Rather than using a setup file that installs itself from the file, it uses a setup file that downloads it off the net for you & then installs it. After a installation process that took a reasonably long time, it gave me the option to import all the settings from Firefox. This certainly makes migrating from Firefox to Chrome a bit easier. It also offers to be your default browser, but it isn’t default. You can’t import Firefox’s setting whilst Firefox is running, so I had to restart Firefox. I decided I would write the rest of this review from Chrome. All my Firefox bookmarks, browsing history & recently closed tabs were all loaded into Chrome without a hitch. Now onto first impressions…


The Graphical User Interface

This is a whole new layout. No menu bar, no status bar & no toolbars. Is this an improvement? Rather than providing a toolbar which you can customize, they have implemented a locked toolbar which only has back, forward & the address bar. Through the settings you can also make a Home button. It also has combined the Go button & the Stop button into one…. It would seem logical to combine it with the Refresh button, not the Go button. Where are the bookmarks? I don’t have a clue. There is a bookmark option on Chrome’s default home site, but there is no menu. You can have a bookmark toolbar if you want, but you can’t just have a menu. Having a toolbar, rather than a menu just wastes screen space. This is useless, as being able to access bookmarks quickly is best achieved through a drop down menu. Whenever your cursor goes over a link, a little text box will scroll into view in the corner, telling you the URL of he link. When your cursor leaves, it goes. All the settings & page configuration are located in 2 small menus in the top right hand corner of the screen.


Speed & Multitasking Capabilities

On my 10 year old laptop, multitasking can result in a OS failure. So let’s see how many tabs I can open up before I crash my PC -
After about 12 tabs were open & Loading up data from the internet, my PC started so have occasional slowups, but mostly, it coped with Chrome very well. This shows that Chrome is certainly efficient with the system’s resources. A then decided to load up multiple seperate instances of Chrome. Again, it coped very well & none of the instances of Chrome had any noticeable GUI lag. Despite it’s slightly flash GUI, it’s fast responding & won’t make your PC crawl. I also noticed that it loaded up webpages a lot faster than Firefox.


Incognito Mode

Often crudely nicknamed by many as ‘Porn Mode’. This mode will not record site history or search history. Once you leave Incognito mode, all the cookies that your PC accepted in this mode will be deleted. Rather than making a tab that is in this mode, it will create an entire Chrome window for this mode. To be honest I’m not impressed by this. My Firefox is configured to be more safe than this by DEFAULT. If it was so stealth then it wouldn’t accept cookies full stop. Firefox has had the steather addon for a while, so Chrome hasn’t made a new feature.


Conclusion

Google Chrome shows promising features. But it is still in early days & it shows it. It is superior to Internet Explorer 7, But compared to Fierfox it has a long way to go. Most of the ‘new features’ aren’t actually new.

Here are the things that need to be improved -

- Customizable toolbars. Have a drag & drop system like Firefox.
- Bookmarks menu. A toolbar & a bookmark new tab page don’t cut it. Menus are the best way of seeing a large amount of bookmarks fast.
- Optional menu toolbar. The menu toolbar should be an option. I mean the toolbar that has File, Edit, View & so on.
- Better default security options. Accepting all cookies should also be turned off by default.
- Script blocker & a easy to use advert blocker should both be integrated or available as an addon.
- Enable the Home button by default.