Google Chrome – first impressions
I guess most of you have heard about Google Chrome by now, courtesy of the interesting comic book marketing device (allegedly accidentally published before it was ready, hhhmmm). Some of the features and design decisions mentioned in the comic made me curious enough to keep an eye out for its release this evening. Ok, it doesn’t run on Linux (yet) but it is open source (Google seem to be using the BSD license for their code in Chrome) and contains some interesting features.
The intention with Google Chrome seems to be to keep the UI clean – first impressions are that they’ve succeeed in doing that. It seems much cleaner than either IE (which I find to be irritatingly non-intuitive) or Firefox (which, while it has a lot going on, since 3.0, manages to display things pretty cleanly).
Interestingly during initial start-up, it offered to import my Firefox settings, but I didn’t see any sign of an offer to import my Internet Explorer settings – not that I would have needed it but there seems to be a statement of intent here.
A quick tour of a few of the sites that I usually visit didn’t reveal any major problems. Chrome also enforces the same kind of warning about self-signed SSL certs that Firefox 3.0 introduced but doesn’t present quite as intimidating a warning. Performance seems pretty good but I couldn’t think of any particularly tortuous sites that I regularly visit so I don’t know how well it will handle heavier sites. I do miss my Adblock Plus Firefox extension though – I didn’t have time to see whether there is anything equivalent in Chrome yet or whether you can somehow get it to use Firefox extensions (mind you, considering Google’s core business, it probably won’t be going out of it’s way to help us filter ads). The new tab page / home page is interesting but I’m not sure how useful it will be in the long-term. I may revisit the same old pages every day more than I realise, in which case it may turn out to be a handy launch-pad.
An hour of use isn’t going to show a great deal. I’ll probably give this a test drive for a week or so before I come to any solid conclusions. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) most of my day-to-day activities are carried out on Linux desktops / notebooks so I won’t get to fully battle test Chrome until they release the Linux port.
First impressions though, are that Google have an interesting new browser with some nice features and that both Microsoft and Mozilla have some interesting times ahead.
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