Google Chrome Review

Posted At : September 2, 2008 4:57 PM
Related Categories: Web Dev

Just installed it. Random first thoughts.

Download Here: http://www.google.com/chrome

My editor for the blog no longer works. I think lots of people will find the WYSIWYIG editors for their blogs and such broken. I THINK FCK now works in latest version but I have yet to test. I have reports that latest wordpress uses latest FCK and works fine.

All my current sites work fine. Gmail nice and snappy. The import tool brought in everything from Firefox.

Install was easy, it required me to close FF first so it could import my bookmarks, default search, etc.

When first running Chrome it asked me if I wanted to keep the search provider it imported (google) and had an option right here to change to something else.

The home page / start page is basically a history of your most popular pages you visit as well as new bookmarks and searches, etc. I like my old home page portal (igoogle) wonder if I should give this some time, I want my feeds darn it.

Ah, in options I can change the default home page behavior, and even have the home button show back up. I set mine up so my home page is the old igoogle page, but a new tab will open their fancy interface with most visited pages and search stuff.

The top bar is very clean.

I swear Plurk is slower in Chrome then FF. Maybe its just plurk though. Need more testing.

It imported my stored usernames and passwords from Firefox.

The URL bar / search box highlights the domain when showing the full url. The rest of the page name and such are lighter gray.

Flash works just fine so far. No need to reinstall flash. Woot! Friend has problems with displaying flash on adobe's site. He has just slightly older version of flash. Works fine for me. Also I heard from someone that gmail attach file wasn't working, though that also works fine for me.

Task Manager is cool: showing plugins and each tab network use, cpu and memory. I LOVE the network use, wasn't expecting that.

Type in about:memory in the browser for very detailed report on memory use and more. cool.

When hovering over link it shows the full url for that link in lower left corner above site content instead of having status bar. Is there no status bar now? hmm.

Feels like beta. I went to adobe pages, got redirected oddly. Sometimes all tabs stop responding for few seconds. Gonna watch task manager for a bit to see whats up.

I have 2 windows with flash open from different sites. Showing plug-in at 40mb and 20-40 cpu. but doesn't show me which one. In fact I think gmail uses flash. It shows plugin when I open up gmail, but when I close that tab plugin goes away. Huh.

Viewing page source shows line numbers.

OH, Inspect Element! Right click on something in page and select 'inspect element' and it shows css/html details. Not the same as firebug, but a good built in option. Resources show colored time to download as well as size. Nice looking stuff.

Friend just told me the inspect element feature is likely Drosera or some variation of it. http://webkit.org/blog/61/introducing-drosera/

I swear sometimes some files or urls or something cause it to redirect. Don't have more details yet but its just odd.

Did we have an option to install anywhere other then 'program files'? I don't recall seeing and I certainly want to do that on my vista box.

Read on twitter how links in http://feeds.adobe.com don't work. Confirmed not working for me in Chrome, but fine in FF. URL Encode issue?

Downloading files is kinda cool. Big arrow points to bottom of page where download status is at. Much better then a pop up window, but maybe not obvious enough for some folks?

Not finding sites that have issues. I want to confirm that if a site has issue in displaying that same issue happens in safari. Anyone with sites as examples please comment.

People with questions on when google chrome talks to google, etc should read this. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

You can easily add more search engines to the suggestion bar or have it not perform that service at all by right clicking the text box and selecting 'edit search engines...'

I want to hide my bookmars bar and just have link or button for them to show up. Easy to hide bookmark bar (cntr b) but then how do I find bookmarks?

I love built in spell checker. looove it.

Doing CNTRL F for find works well, like that it highlights all items on page, then moves through them. Is this same in safari. Bah I need to download and install Safari to compare.

I was resisting Safari as I didn't like apple forcing it in my updater. Silly reason, but still.

Interesting. The 'chrome' in Vista looks so much better then xp. Its blue in xp, and Vista is black/grey. Just looks better.

Don't bother trying to open xml or RSS with the browser yet. Just junk.

Sometimes when I am typing in a form box that should have focus there is a long pause. Just now it interpreted whatever I was typing as 'go back 3 pages in history' hmm. Ah, I see. hitting the backspace key on keyboard goes back in history. So if your typing something in but something is wrong, it ignores all letters till you hit backspace.

HAH! Google Groups doesn't support Chrome yet. To edit pages and such you must use FF or IE. :-)

In textareas (big boxes for html forms) there are now little dots in the bottom right corner. Click and drag those dots to make the text area bigger for a page if needed. Seems to work pretty well. I can't make it smaller, only bigger though. Interestingly once I made the field larger, it stayed that way on future visits.

Must find way to disable backspace key on keyboard from taking me back in history. I HATE it!

Looks like there is a themes folder for the install. So clearly we will see some sort of themes option at a later date.

The user agent for Chrome is: (likely to change) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.A.B.C Safari/525.13

Just crashed on me for the first time. The other tabs were completely useless while the video stuttered (embeded youtube). eventually a pop up told me the tab was stalled and did I want to kill it. I said yes, and after a very long time, it closed, but the whole system and all other tabs were very slow to respond still. It certainly didn't keep the instability contained to just one tab. Maybe thats because it wasn't JS but a plugin?

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How about importing RSS feeds from Firefox...the bookmarks migration did not include feeds that were in FF

# Posted By Anand | 9/2/08 3:21 PM

MAJOR PROBLEM: the licence agreement for the binary download REQUIRES you to accept auto-updates from Google.

The browser options don't appear to provide any mechanism of preventing auto-updating from happening.

So, Google can do anything they like with the browser in the name of "upgrades". Not good IMHO.

# Posted By Silas Denyer | 9/2/08 3:37 PM

On my laptop, vertical scrolling with the touchpad is screwed : it works downwards by not upwards.

Same issue with importing RSS feeds from Firefox.

Given also the fact that there does not seem to be any add on à la Firefox, it's a no brainer as far as i am concerned : i'm sticking with Firefox

# Posted By bob | 9/2/08 3:43 PM

Chrome seems to not like Wetpaint too well. (My wiki) It feels like a beta, but I was impressed with its speed and how it imported all of my FF settings. I seemed to have issues with tabs being unresponsive with certain pdfs open as well. But that happens from time to time for me in FF as well.

# Posted By John | 9/2/08 3:46 PM

The browser is a good concept, but a little shaky. Some of the fonts rendered are not clear, making it unusable.

The rest of the sites which load fine look good. The browser seems fast, and it a sure firefox killer.
http://www.techielife.com/google-chrome-initial-re...

# Posted By Aditya | 9/2/08 3:58 PM

A few more observations:

Oh dear, oh dear, no. Chrome seems to be doing its own DNS lookups and/or using a Google proxy. Trying

There's no control for scroll-wheel behaviour: at the moment it seems to be out-of-kilter, scrolling far too far in one "bump" than other applications, and it can't be adjusted - very boring!

There's no "blue bar" - it is, for me, *very* annoying not to be able to gauge how fast a site is loading, how much further there is to go, and so on - so, for instance, one can choose to give up and try another site (or try this one later).

There's no "fullscreen" mode that I can find - you can only do that by creating an application shortcut, which is boring and long-winded for most purposes.

Stop doesn't mean stop! I hit the "X" to stop loading a site part-way, yet the "loading" rotating tab icon keeps on rotating. Has it stopped yet? Or not???

If I type in www.google.com or www.google.fr I want just that. I DO NOT WANT google to redirect me to www.google.co.uk (I'm in the UK). I want to turn this off, but I can't. Dull.

Typing in a new address is not very reliable, it seems. Some bug or another, but it just "sits" there instead for ages before loading the new site. Need to open a new tab, it seems, and type in there for a quick response.

The browser's colour highlighting of the active text entry box on a webpage is annoying and unnecessary. It is not for Google to try to fix the UI "ills" it perceives in the world. Why can't I turn this off?

Why is there no "not now" option for saving passwords? I often want to decide later whether to save my password or not, but instead all I can do is say "never for this site." Did Google talk to any users? An "X" is not an intuitive substitute.

Competing with MS is one thing, but throwing away years of interface conventions and platform UI standards is, frankly, arrogant and annoying, although it follows Safari/Windows in that regard. Where is the top-left icon to provide a window menu? Where is the bottom-right drag handle? Why are the minimise / maximise / close buttons non-standard sizes / designs? A lot of platform user training depends on this stuff, as do things like screen readers, third-party tools, and so on. Can you imagine them trying this on a Mac?

Oh and why choose webkit, the least-supported engine in the world? :)

# Posted By Silas Denyer | 9/2/08 4:22 PM

I too see a pause when loading PDF's. Initial rendering is super fast, but as you scroll it halts for about 5 secs.

Password saving is like FF3, you can save the password after the browser has rendered the page following the authentication prompt.

To terminate tabs that misbehave, you have to use the Chrome task manager to identify the tab, windows task manager just shows multiple instances of chrome.exe. This proves however that each tab is truly a separate process.

# Posted By JP White | 9/2/08 4:24 PM

Guys the browser is in beta stage, it's not perfect and it has a few problems but really being the first of it's kind from Google I applaud them for the great effort and I am sure this browser is going to lead the market in due time! I mean hell it has built in spell checking right off the bat just like Firefox does and IE8 beta has yet to implement this so Google is definitely headed in the right direction with this browser! Give it some time is all I'm asking. :)

# Posted By Concepts | 9/2/08 4:37 PM

Anyone figured out how to import feeds from Firefox...also noticed that it doesnt detect RSS feeds from websites automatically...whats up with that!? Missed out?

# Posted By Anand | 9/2/08 4:40 PM

I haven't seen any RSS options at all yet. Interesting. Maybe they just haven't added that to beta yet?

# Posted By Joshua | 9/2/08 4:42 PM

Google chrome is definitely faster than IE and I like the overall look and user interface. It takes less memory and processor share compared to other popular browsers.

The speed of loading the pages and the browser itself is really fast. It performs very well even with 30 tabs open. (I could never open more than 15 tabs in IE)

The default home page of Chrome is pretty. It creates a default page with links to frequently visites web pages using thumbnail images of the website screen. Even though it looks like, I was not very happy on it since I may not want everyone to see my frequently visited site list!

Couple of things that I did not like on the initial release are:

1. The font does not look very sharp and clear. It is not eye-friendly at all. May be I need to do some research and make appropriate settings.

2. Beta version of Google Chrome is highly unstable. See some Google chrome reviews which shows screenshots of the crash reports - http://www.indiastudychannel.com/resources/35865-G...

3. Chrome automatically imported all of my bookmarks from IE without prompting me. It made my job easier, however, I am sure many will be concerned on this.

# Posted By Kichu | 9/2/08 5:56 PM

I started Chrome with loads of enthusiasm and my first experiment went wrong with Chrome. I opened some 14-15 sites in tabs and the result: I had Youtube opened in one tab and it stopped working and to get it working I had to close the browser and restart it. Tried the same thing again few times and result is same. Moreover, I compared the result with Firefox 3.0 and I found it better than Chrome.

No doubt, Google always comes with something better so keeping my eyes wide open because its just the first day of Chrome.

# Posted By Vipin | 9/2/08 6:56 PM

Great review! Check mine out at http://brunovalle.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/google-...

# Posted By Bruno Valle | 9/2/08 7:03 PM

having a problem with playing yatzy on http://www.playandwin.co.uk get a grey box with a white line when i actually goto play. This problem exists in all my browsers and was hoping chrome would fix it. Only happens on that game and works fine on older computers. Another thing worth mentioning is that java doesnt come preinstalled and you need a version that isnt freely available on the sun java site yet. You can get jave v6 update 10 from the help files of google chrome by ytping java into the search help box. Having a few hesitation problems but probably the computer just getting use to the extra memory allication it is going to use at first. It is in beta though and over all I seem quite impressed. Seems faster on most sites.

# Posted By chris | 9/2/08 7:16 PM

On Vista, I run with large icons (I have a big screen so why not). I find that all Google apps only come with a small Vista icon. Hopefully they will offer the full size range that Vista can handle.

# Posted By Jason | 9/2/08 9:52 PM

THe problem i have with chrome is.. THE INSANE memmory usage. I ran a comparison of some usual habbits, opening tabs etc.. in firefox. In my usual usage, firefox was up at 83 megs usage. CHrome was up at 250 megs..

Fortunately, i have 4 gigs.. but when i think about some of the low end vista machines being passed out by companies.. i don't see how this product can be sustained without either EVERYONE in the world converting to 64 bit operating systems and throwing in 16 gigs of ram, or severely reducing the absurd memory usage...

great UI, great concept.. poor implementation (from a system resources POV)

# Posted By david | 9/3/08 1:12 AM

this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft's browser dominance. And this is just BETA

# Posted By nate k | 9/3/08 1:19 AM

Facebook experience:
Surely the first thing would be trying Facebook on Chrome. It opened fine and allowed me to view pages as usual. When I opened the Photos section, here comes the twist. Try to click on one of the albums and you will get stuck on the first photo that you have opened. Try clicking ‘Next’ for the rest of the pictures; unfortunately you will get stuck on the first one. So checking out the rest of the photos on the Chrome was such a laborious that I had to give up.

Hotmail experience:
Let’s try to login to hotmail account for the first time using Google Chrome. What do you get the first message?
Upgrade your web browser
We recommend that you upgrade your web browser so you can get the most out of Windows Live Hotmail. Upgrading should only take a few minutes. To get started, choose one of the browsers below:
· Microsoft Internet Explorer

· Mozilla Firefox

· Apple Safari

If you don’t want to upgrade right now you can still continue to Windows Live Hotmail, but some parts of it may not work and it may not be displayed properly.

That wasn’t surely the thing I was expecting for the first time user experience with Google Chrome. However you can continue with logging in but the later behavior might not be 100%, nevertheless yet to follow up on this issue.

# Posted By shaztechy | 9/3/08 1:30 AM

I too facing problem with scrolling up with the scroller , though it does it neatly with the scroll bar and the arrow keys but still its kind of irritating. Also for the downloading it does not ask for the options available to download i.e. either run directly through any application or flashget and just does it the way it wants to.
Will wait for something concrete some up gradations then might think of switching to it. Firefox is much more handy and convenient as of now.

# Posted By Nishant Gulati | 9/3/08 1:38 AM

Google Chrome breaks by obeying alternate style rules as if active.

Basics here:

http://jeremyjarratt.com/2008/09/03/...alternate-c...

Basically, avoid style conflicts, and list your alternate links BEFORE your active ones.

# Posted By jeremy | 9/3/08 2:37 AM

A tad disappointed with their beta release... lots of issues from regular websites viewing... from facebook apps not working properly (e.g. friends for sale, unable to buy) to java not working properly (fancybox and clones, works on first click, second click gets you no where), poor flash performance (interactive charts a choppy). Of course all the above work great in FF and IE. I see this becoming a web development nightmare in having to dealing with more web browser that behaves differently even though they claim to be standard compliant.
I question the lack of options chrome offers... I miss having my cache cleared automatically for me upon exit or all the neat add-ons (but give it time for add-ons)...
As with the rest of Google apps, this will stay in Beta stages for years to come...
I do love the multi-layer approach to loading webpages as it makes some pages load much faster. I just don’t see the flash or java support being up there... unless they all have to be tweaked for chrome?
Why don't they just jump in bed (deeper) with FF and combine the two to make one heck of a browser?... for now I'm sticking with FF and IE...

# Posted By Tester | 9/3/08 3:12 AM

Very light on resources love the browser

see review here
http://megawallpapers.info/?p=23

# Posted By Pradeep | 9/3/08 4:40 AM

I think its a very promising beta release.
I was getting annoyed with the search bar forcing me into google.fr because i'm in France even when I had told it in google.fr to take me to google.com. Looking at the search options I couldn't change the {google:baseURL} parameter.. but then I restarted the browser and it switched to using .com so all good for now!

# Posted By mushypea | 9/3/08 4:41 AM

hi, there's the current percentage share of google chrome:
flash-counter.com/

# Posted By Mike | 9/3/08 10:19 AM

Doesn't seem to be working at all. OS - Windows XP SP2

# Posted By Denis | 9/3/08 12:31 PM

Feedburner seems to have an issue displaying a Feed XML (doesn't display anything). Re the spell-checker - it's nice but needs options to ignore certain strings or add them to the dictionary. It's annoying seeing it flag "XML" as a mistake when there's no actual mistake.

# Posted By John | 9/3/08 2:43 PM

Hi:

Great Blog!

Google Chrome is definitely Beta 1 and needs lot of work before prime time. More user experience at:

http://www.onefamilysblog.com/2008/09/google-chrom...

# Posted By ofb | 9/3/08 2:46 PM

hi joshua
nice review
check out my review of Google Chrome at http://historyview.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chr... and let me know what you think.
cheers.

# Posted By harkabir | 9/3/08 4:18 PM

Something that disappoints me slightly -- no paste on right click. Tried copying something into a Gmail email and it had to be done with CTRL + V!

And when I typed Gmail into this comment it noted a spelling error (with their own product?!) but there's no option to add...

# Posted By adeling | 9/3/08 6:28 PM

My test results: http://lindipendente.splinder.com/post/18268393/Fi...

# Posted By Dario de Judicibus | 9/3/08 8:02 PM

I like the back button to start page. Typically when FF or ie are at the beginning of a "web Experience" you cannot use your back button. Chrome allows you to back out to your recent/history/bookmark page. Neat

# Posted By Jarrod | 9/3/08 11:54 PM

no Re-Load on Right Click

# Posted By Jarrod | 9/3/08 11:55 PM

I'm usually excited with Google products but this is not cool!!! As a web developer this just created another huge issue!!!! Now not only do you have to worry about firefox and IE but Chrome as well. So far from it's beta release we can see that a lot of the Web 2.0 sites have problems since most rely on floating divs and relative or absolute positions.

I wish there was one and only one browser! Why so many? Firefox was proven to overcome all because of it's open sorce and the people behind it. Either kill Chrome or kill firefox(sad to say since I love firefox).

# Posted By Javier | 9/4/08 2:42 AM

hello , i hope too , me too i am a fanboy of Google, Google Chrome has impressed us,nothing to say about that. By the way, i a am a blogger too and i have a more write a more detail review on Google Chrome, just take a look on my blog >>

http://hostintruder.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/googl...

Keep it up man !

# Posted By Host Intruder | 9/4/08 6:53 AM

autohide taskbar on XP. does not work with Chrome, not unhiding,

# Posted By arunsoni | 9/4/08 7:48 AM

No matter who so ever comes. Mozilla will remain the fastest and the best forever.

# Posted By deepak | 9/4/08 10:08 AM

Fellas, Google chrome has serious issues with my laptop(which is Dell Vostro 1400 on Vista). Yesterday, my laptop got heated so much and all the processes started getting slow. When i say heated up, i mean it got really heated up. I could hear the fan spinning from my laptop!!!!
I was not able to touch my keypad/mousepad it was burning hot. The battery led was glowing red and blinking even when i was connected to direct power and my battery had enough for 2 hrs.
I then closed Chrome and started with Firefox, then everything chilled down. I agree that Chrome looks cool but until they fix these unexpected bugs and change the "Beta'' attitude probably i am never going to trust anything new and untested.

Watchout guys!!

# Posted By Vijay | 9/4/08 11:42 AM

Is it me or the smooth scrolling doesn't works anymore? It won't aloud me to scroll up a site.. it'll only scroll down? anyone noticed?

# Posted By Alex69 | 9/4/08 2:53 PM

Chrome is not ready for "prime time"

# Posted By Leonardo Pucci | 9/4/08 11:16 PM

It is a really a good review.
Some other review can be found at http://raiyaraj.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/first-exp...

# Posted By RaiyaRaj | 9/5/08 1:25 AM

Don't like it: they should add Mouse gestures and all firefox plugins like seoquake

# Posted By Lamp docs | 9/5/08 4:05 AM

Its fast. It looks good. And I like the fact that the toolbars are pretty small as well as the boarders leaving lots of room for the webpages. I also like how it loads pics so they fit with just a single click anywhere to enlarge them. One of the main things I dont like so far is how it scrolls on my laptop. Its too jumpy and scrolls by jumping several lines at a time instead of being fairly smooth like IE. I want to do anything I can to move away from microsofts programs but I will probably end up back there because of some of the small things. Its a good attempt at a browser and I am sure it will be improved. It just needs more customizable options.

# Posted By Mike | 9/5/08 10:02 AM

It seems that Google have taken all of the other features off all of the other browsers, and put them all together - pointless! Opera already do a home page with links to favorite pages - this sucks, since I was expecting something really innovative, esp from a company that is meant to be on the forefront of technology and stuff like that. "Google MagPie" would be a good google service.

I really cannot see the point in chrome...FF are doin much more, and what really bothers me is how they've taken from the OS community, and made a *PRODUCT* with the purpose of strengthening their commercial position

Plus Google's privacy is driven by its need to make profit - it sucks!

# Posted By Max | 9/5/08 8:48 PM

i can't get it to open any web pages at all. what is it that i am doing wrong. i down load it but it just won't open anything.

# Posted By Ron | 9/6/08 4:22 PM

Before you write anything else, take a little refresher English course in the use and difference between "then" and than."

Moderator Comment for Marvin: Seeing as how we all have to write almost all the time to work, play and generally get along, I see that suggestion as infeasible, expensive and frankly just stupid. A better comment might have been one that spends two more sentences explaining the wrong and right for all to learn from.

# Posted By Marvin | 9/6/08 9:18 PM

I agree with Marvin. I do not know if for Joshua English is his first language, but surely it is not for me. When I began to add English article to my blog in addition to the Italian one, I was doubtful. I knew my English was far to be perfect, far to be good too, and that I would have filled in my articles lots of errors, but it was the only way to communicate with the rest of the world. Since no more than 60 millions people in world read Italian, I had to write in English. So I did. What I expect from English readers, that is, those ones whom English is the first language for, is just patience. Unless they wish to learn Italian, they will have to live with my poor English. That's all, folk!

# Posted By Dario de Judicibus | 9/7/08 11:42 AM

Google Chrome is very good on productivity field. Even more, I think that it is first browser really designed with productivity in mind, here is an article with review of top 10 productivity features in Chrome: http://productivity-science.com/blogen/post/Top-10...

# Posted By ProductivityScience | 9/9/08 7:55 AM

I know it's a beta, but the ability to download a .pdf should have been something the cleared up before they put this thing online.

# Posted By Rod | 9/12/08 4:44 PM

I have downloaded PDF files several times. What issue are you specifically having?

# Posted By Joshua Cyr | 9/12/08 4:51 PM

Personally i like and use Mozilla Firefox. When i installed this it was slow, and made Firefox crash a lot! The only good thing i can say about it is IT AS VERY EASY TO UNINSTALL!!!!!!!!!

# Posted By John | 9/12/08 9:41 PM

tabs are great, so is incognito

BUT-- how do you get rid of sites visited. they start to build up
How do you send web pages and links like i do in Netscape
No way to rearrange imported bookmarks, they are listed alpha
won't open pics sent in e mails, Mozella did

# Posted By Fred Heiberger | 9/12/08 9:46 PM

there's a big security risks with the usage of 'remember passwords on all the pages'.
If you go to the Options tab and then passwords section, you can check all the passwords for all the sites you have ever visited by clicking on show saved passwords.
All the passwords are in actual and not even masked.

# Posted By Arijit | 9/13/08 12:29 AM

I just downloaded Google Chrome on Vista as well, will have to see what happens with the browser. So far I like it, it seems very very light. no clutter and a different than we're all used to layout. Like downloading Firefox for the first time..

# Posted By theFrosty | 9/13/08 3:52 AM

there are so many advantages and features with Chrome, such as it's speed, for example; now if only they would take care it's flighty cookie management...

# Posted By film fan | 9/16/08 6:35 PM

For the person who asked "Why choose webkit?", I'd guess they chose it because it's the fastest rendering web browser engine in the world. And I think it's popularity-by-default in the mac and iphone world will ensure continued leading edge updates as we've seen from it for the past few years.

I personally can't get any files to download - everything ends up as a 3k file header only, no data/resources at all in the file. gmail attachments, right-click-to-download/save-file links, everything. Also quite unstable for me, several lockups (but I push browsers really hard, operating systems too for that matter).

So it's a nogo for me in this beta release. I can't even use it for casual browsing because I jump from site to site every few seconds and chrome can't keep up. I have no doubt it's bugs plus debugging code in this release causing the problems and will all be sorted out, but for now I can't go further.

And the right-click to view css details about an element has been part of webkit in safari/mac from the beginning, although you generally have those options hidden in the release version of safari.

I still have ie7 and ie6 has too many css layout issues, firefox is the biggest waste of system memory I've ever seen (good browser, just literally hangs onto huge memory resources during use and doesn't let them go when it should), safari is still my browser of choice on either platform. If I must use firefox I tend to use k-meleon 1.5 instead (mozilla engine like firefox, better windows gui coding by FAR, smaller, faster, less memory use).

I hope Chrome gets to a good level - this is the first google app beta release I've seen that was so far off the usability mark in it's initial attempt - I guess google sees now how frickin tough it is to write a great browser AND win over the popularity of people engrossed in other browsers' UI wierdness already.

Cheers

# Posted By Don Kelley | 9/17/08 7:44 PM

Some of my sites CSS code looks fine in a new Google browser Chrome, bad in Mozilla (<3.0 versions) ex., http://www.campfans.net/
P.S. Thank you, Joshua for this GREAT review.
P.S.S. I'm using Chrome now ;)

# Posted By Andrew S. | 9/30/08 9:20 AM

it claims to be faster but often freezes for a few seconds. i don't know maybe it is settings but i can download only one think (film clip) in one time. while it is downloading i can't do anything.
awkward bookmarks. I'm not convienced.

# Posted By andrej | 9/30/08 6:52 PM

First of all, Google Chrome Beta (yes, it’s still in beta) which was released not long ago should not be compared with any browser because it has been released for a short while and this is there first browser and it’s just a Beta (not the completed version) unlike Firefox, and yet it still manages to challenge Firefox. Wait until Google releases 1-3 more updates/upgrades/newer versions to Google chrome and then try it again and most of you would like it (or since i’m now posting this, try the latest version of Google Chrome) but if you want add-ons/extensions that don’t slow down your browser or cause other issues like with Firefox, give Google 5 months - 1 year. Also, Google Chrome, believe it or not, is much faster, has a cleaner interface, uses less memory, crashes less than Firefox (with me) and is more secure and Google releases 10-30 nightly builds of Google Chrome everyday and also has a Developers/Testers channel which has newer versions of Google Chrome every 1-2 weeks (with a change log and new features etc) which are tested before they are publicly released. Google Chrome's EUlA was changed the day it was released when an error was found in it.

# Posted By ADMIN | 10/26/08 4:14 PM

I hesitate to use even upgraded versions of Chrome, since my last experience using it (first version) left my computer compromised; have they fixed the security issues beyond all doubt?

# Posted By patrick | 11/21/08 9:26 PM

when you close Google chrome while downloading a file it ends the download and you have to start it from the beginning.how to solve this problem?

# Posted By taan | 3/10/09 3:21 AM

ow there are all kinds of cool architectural ideas around Google Chrome, but right now, they don't matter so much to me. It's not like Firefox 3 is a horrible piece of junk that crashes every 10 minutes. The new architecture might pay off down the road, but right now, I don't see a strong case for switching.