Google Chrome Review
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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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.
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
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...
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? :)
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.
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.
No doubt, Google always comes with something better so keeping my eyes wide open because its just the first day of Chrome.
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)
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.
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.
Basics here:
http://jeremyjarratt.com/2008/09/03/...alternate-c...
Basically, avoid style conflicts, and list your alternate links BEFORE your active ones.
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...
see review here
http://megawallpapers.info/?p=23
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!
flash-counter.com/
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...
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.
And when I typed Gmail into this comment it noted a spelling error (with their own product?!) but there's no option to add...
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).
http://hostintruder.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/googl...
Keep it up man !
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!!
Some other review can be found at http://raiyaraj.wordpress.com/2008/09/04/first-exp...
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!
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.
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
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.
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
P.S. Thank you, Joshua for this GREAT review.
P.S.S. I'm using Chrome now ;)
awkward bookmarks. I'm not convienced.