Google Chrome: Who needs privacy anyway? (Google Chrome)

Member Name: Review_God

Product:	Google Chrome
Date:	31/10/08 (410 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, fast, lots of features

Disadvantages: When you use it, you have no privacy

Google, which may as well own the internet, is no longer content with having the most used web page on the internet - it now wants to own the way you view that web page. Enter Google Chrome, a new web browser that will compete with the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Netscape, Flock, Avant Browser, Mozilla and AOL Explorer. My point? The browser market is flooded with programs, so it takes a lot to be successful in it.

Before going on to see what Google has does to make Chrome have an impact, we'll see what the competition has done. The biggest web browser is Internet Explorer, which has a 72.22% share of the browser usage of the world. Microsoft achieved this percentage by putting Internet Explorer in Windows so that everybody just uses it by default. Firefox is second with 19.48%, which was achieved by making it open source, showing how many more features than Internet Explorer it has and how generally better it is. Third is Apple's Safari browser with 6.39%. Safari is bundled with Macs, and is also the browser on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.

So out of all the millions of web browsers, these are top three. It is almost impossible to judge the popularity of a browser by it's features, as everybody has a different opinion and often other factors come into play. Internet Explorer is often critisized for being lacking in features, yet it has the highest market share because Microsoft also owns the most used operating system in the world.

I'll come onto what will give Chrome it's chance at being popular but first I'll go over it's features, which are actually quite good for a beta program (which it is, by the way). It has the basics like tabs, bookmarks, zooming, find etc. but also has some new an mostly unique features. Firstly, Google Chrome is a very speedy browser. It has proven to be faster at loading web pages than every browser it has been tested against - including the top three. It certainly feels much faster to use than what I have used before.

Every tab in Google Chrome runs as a separate process on your computer. What this means is that if a website crashes the browser will not crash, only that tab. I think this is a very clever idea, though I'm not sure how useful it'll actually be in practice.

Another feature is the integration of 'Google Gears' into Google Chrome, which allows you to place shortcuts of websites on your desktop. The idea is that if you have a website you use a lot, for example Dooyoo, you can open it quickly just like any other program. When you click the shortcut, the website will open in a stripped down Goolge Chrome window, so the website does actually look like a program of it's own. I think this is a nifty feature and I can that it could be useful, but don't really use it. As I usually have a browser open anyway, it's easier for me to just click on a bookmark.

The browser is very easy to use. The default hompage displays your most visited websites so that you can just click on them straight away - no bookmark or web address required. The address bar is also a search box and will give suggestions, so you can only type part of an address and it will guess where you want to go based on you browsing history. You can also Google search in the address bar, so you don't even need to use the Google homepage.

Chrome also has an 'incognito' mode, which allows you to surf the web without having any of the sites you visit appear on your browsing history. It also stops cookies and things from being downloaded. Google's reasoning for this mode was 'for buying presents', but I can think of other internet related habits that people might want to keep hidden...

Speaking of privacy, when you use Google products you have none. With Google Search, Google keeps a record of everything you search for, but Google Chrome is worse. Everythng you type in the adddress bar is sent off to Google - ie. all your searches and all your web addresses. This is what allows Google to suggest things to you, but is it worth it?

Actually, I've been using Google Chrome as my browser for about a month. I had been using Firefox, but I loved the speed and ease of use of Chrome. However having just thought about it, I think I'd rather not tell Google everything I ever do on the internet. It's back to Firefox to me.

So, will Google Chrome be sucessful? I think it will. After about a month since release it has about a 1% share of the browser market. Considering it is still a beta product, I think this is quite good. Google can make this figure increase whenever they want to - afterall they have the most visited website on the internet. All they'd have to do is put a big advertisement for Chrome on google.com and it's success is pretty much guaranteed. Remember what I said about features being irrelevant?

Summary: It is a good browser, but I would suggsest staying away for the sake of your browsing habits.

Reliability:
Ease of use:
Installation:
Noise:
Speed:
Variety of features: