Yesterday I watched the Google Chrome screencast and installed Google Chrome on a few machines just to find out what all the hype was about. Apparently this is a very important project to Google as the two Google founders where in on the screencast and spoke about how this browser will be better than anything on the market.
So is Google Chrome worth the hype?
Here are a few tidbits that I picked up and just wanted to highlight if you do indeed install and try out Google Chrome.
Fast and faster Javascript – The browser itself is really fast at rendering pages and the really new part is the new javascript rendering engine that makes all of those web 2.0 sites come up really quick
Add a homepage button – As you start to use Google Chrome you will notice that it is missing a lot of stuff on the top, the only thing that I really wanted was to add a homepage button. go to the wrench, to options, and in the middle of the basic tab you will find a “Add Home Page Button” button
Drag out windows – One neat feature is that you can drag out a single tab to become a new Google Chrome app so that you can have it independent of the original one you were running, also the tabs moving around very smoothly
No Firefox extensions – Something that stops me from moving from FireFox to Google Chrome is that there is no support yet for Firefox extensions, and the extensions, I think, are the best part of Firefox they really allow me to customize my web environment
Each tab is it’s own process – One good plus to Google Chrome is that each tab is it’s own process so if one tab is having trouble loading some code or a page it will not affect the rest of the Google Chrome tabs. I have had trouble in the past with FireFox with one bad tab hanging everything in FireFox.
Omnibox navigation – I am not too sure about the Omnibox, the idea of the omnibox is that you can type in a web address or a search query and Chrome will automatically see what you want and bring up that result, in Firefox it will do a “I feel lucky” and in the case of a search query it will return the first result from Google.
No Autospell checker – This is a real failing of Google Chrome. I am a crappy speller and in WordPress or even when doing forum or blog commenting i love how FireFox will automatically underline errors in my spelling and give me the correct spelling with a simple right click.
Memory Hog? – I just read a great article by Andrew Wee about how the Chrome browser is a real resource hog and I can imagine that it is. If you had 10 or 15 tabs open there would be one process for the browser itself and then another process running independently for every one of those tabs. I have run the Google Chrome browser on a bunch of machines over the last day or so and really I have not seen any problems with performance, the browser loads quickly and renders pages just as queickly with one or 10 tabs open from what I have seen so far.
The new Google Browser is a very simple install and you should try it. Download it and see if the hype machine is right in saying that it is the best browser ever or if the hype is a little unjustified for your taste. I am finding it a great secondary browser today but it has a long way to go to get me to ditch FireFox.
