Chrome-awesome

The new Internet browser from Google was officially released only last September 2 2008 and already, it gained popularity not seen in many years among other technology products out there. The browser players are quite a small bunch – there’s Internet Explorer from Microsoft, Firefox from Mozilla, Safari from Apple and now Chrome from Google – but the browser market is quite huge, enough for these companies to invest billions of dollars on a nifty product called browser.

Just yesterday, I downloaded a copy of Chrome to see for myself what this browser is all about and will it live up to the hype that it’s generating. This is what I found out. Downloading is fast and easy. Click a few buttons, count from 1 to 10, and that’s it. Installation done. The interface is classic Google – simple and functional. I read up a few articles about this new product from Google and from what I gather, they are trying to re-engineer the entire browser experience. (There is even a comic book available if you want to know the story behind Chrome. It’s actually for geeks presented in a layman’s way. I did not finish the comic book but if you’re interested, you can read it here.)

If their objective is to re-engineer, I think they made a few strides on that part. I have Firefox, Safari and IE on my laptop and I can say, the experience is almost similar. With Chrome, the feeling is different and it’s good. Another major plus point of this new browser according to some tech reviews is its “Over-all JavaScript Speed”
I don’t want to bore you with technical details but the conclusion of that test revealed that Chrome performed much much faster than all the rest of the browsers out there.

From the vantage point of this average user – the speed is barely noticeable. Maybe because there are whole lot of factors that affect “speed”. I don’t know. I’ll just have to trust the experts on this one.

Although slowly, I’m falling in love with Chrome, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its downside. Firstly, it still contains some bugs that they need to address. I tried running one website in IE, then run the same website in Chrome. The latter did not display the pages correctly while the former did just fine. I’d like to note though that this is just one of the many websites I tried to run. Chrome worked perfectly fine on those other websites.

Another concern I have is that Chrome, by default, stores a complete history of your visited websites. This can be a good thing as it provides ease of use but how about privacy concerns? What if other people have access to the laptop or PC you’re using? Upon launching the browser (Chrome), it automatically displays a screen capture in thumbnail of your Most Visited sites. I think this feature will cause concern for some people. You can choose “Incognito mode” for private browsing but this is not the default. The Chrome logo also doesn’t help in addressing privacy issues as it looks like an eye spying on everything you do. Who came up with that logo? Can you change that please. It doesn’t go with Google’s “do no evil” mantra.

Over-all, I’m letting Chrome stay in my laptop but I’m not yet making it my default browser.

Are you ready to download Google Chrome? Click here.