Google Chrome : First impressions
3 September 2008
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5 Comments
Yes, the much awaited google web browser Google Chrome is out few hours back. Yet, it is not available for linux now. So, i had to boot to Vista after a long time. So, lets look at some of its pros and cons.
Pros
- Clean and simple GUI – The GUI is very well designed. The clean GUI provides a bigger viewport. Tabs moved to the title bar helps the cause. Yet, the GUI is simple but it is very much stylish too.
- New Tab – The New Tab which contains Most visited webpages thumbnail, is quite appealing.
- Address Bar – The Address Bar integrated with web search and web history beats the Firefox 3 and IE 8 which do not contain web search.
- Tabbing – The tabbing system with some cool effect and tittle bar postioning is good. The feature to drag a tab to make a new window and new tab opens next to parent tab also is very good. Although, i liked the tabbing feature of IE 8 better because of colouring of tabs.
- Incognito Mode – Quite similar to privacy mode of IE 8, this is very helpful for those who use others pc frequently for browsing.
- Downloads – Downloads starts at bottom of the page and shows download status.
- Memory – The memory consumed is almost half that of Firefox 3 and IE 8.
- Application Shortcut – Handy tool for making shortcuts for webpages on the desktop. Quite useless for me, i like to hide my desktop icons.
- Task Manager – The taskmanager give details of memory and cpu uses for every page. Quite helpful for web developers.
Cons
- Addons – No addons. This is where Firefox kicks everybodies a**.
- No Home – There is no concept of homepage. The New Tab page replaces the homepage.
- No linux version yet.
- Every time i try to find one, the pros list keep getting longer.
The pros very much outweighs the cons. Being its first release, i think google has live upto its expectations. The time is near to change our web browsers folks.
P.S – I like the icon very much.
You can set a homepage, there is an option is settings menu
@ Keshav edited thanks
Chrome is currently just a lot of hype. It brings very little, if anything new to the browser table and is not, as you claim, more memory efficient (as if it even mattered given the price of memory these days). The few features it does have that firefox 3 doesn’t can be added to FF via addons. The addon system is, in general, the way to handle features like the task manager that are clearly developer oriented and just add bloat for users who don’t need or want them. The only thing it really seems to bring is the incognito mode which IE had first.
@ ota yes, i tend to agree with u on some points. Yes, it is getting a lot of hype since its a google product.But as far as memory is concerned, it also connects with the fact that how fast it is. And without a doubt is is faster than any of its other competitors. And not lets forget the fact that its the first ever and “beta” release of Chrome.
First, please let me thank you for creating such a wonderful blog. I came here because of stumbleapon, but I find myself drawn to bookmarking this great part of the web.
Because this IS Google Chrome we are talking about, let me give a few points of view from a programmers perspective.
First off, let me point out that you did a wonderful job noticing the small things that most people don’t notice. (I may ask you to review some of my own work some time…) One of the important things that you pointed out was the tabs on the title bar. Not only is that a great idea, I cant even figure out how they managed to accomplish it. I wont go into great detail, but lets just say that I have spent quite a while trying to figure it out. You also point out that the downloads start at the bottom of the page. I must agree that this is a wonderful change to normal browsers. It is useful not having tons of windows cluttering up the task bar, and it looks good too! I could continue on the small things all day, but there is still much left to discuss.
You covered its cons very well, but I am afraid that there are a few things left unsaid.
Its downloading function looks great, and it works fairly well too. But it lacks some speed and stability that other browsers -cough-firefox-cough- tend to do very well. See, I am a dialup user. An 8MB file for me takes about 35 to 40 min to complete. When that download is dropped, this is not a welcome surprise. And unfortunately, that is one of its flaws. It likes to drop downloads the second the server that you are downloading from stops responding. I believe that they could improve it by having it ask a few more times.
Something else to mention is its lack of support for youtube, which is actually a major surprise. I wont go to far into it, but it likes to freeze and completely crash while downloading youtube videos.
Unfortunatly, until it comes up with support for addons and themes(Themes are in the works already…), I am going to have to stick to using Firefox as my main browser.
I wont go to much further as I am sure that you have other things to do then to listen to me ramble. Good bye friends.
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