Not bad for a first attempt, but could do better (Google Chrome)

Member Name: Fiver29

Product:	Google Chrome
Date:	15/02/09 (115 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast, less resource hungry

Disadvantages: No add-ons, awkward searching

Having been a fan of Firefox for a long time, and having tried Safari but not liked it, I was a bit dubious about using a new browser, but I thought I'd give Chrome a go after it was put on general release.

~Chrome~

I watched the live launch of Google some months ago, and I have to say I was very impressed by the presentation. Chrome looked extremely slick and full of useful features.

The first thing to notice about Chrome is the lack of a search box. The address bar doubles up as a search box as well (the box is known as an omnibox). Also as you are typing it offers suggestions from previously browsed sites that match what you are searching for.

As with Firefox (and I believe Internet Explorer now) Chrome has tabbed browsing. Opening a new tab you can see most visited sites, your recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs, rather than just a blank page.
The tabs are dynamic, which means you can drag them out and make new windows if you desire, or you can switch them around into whatever order you like. Unlike Firefox if one tab crashes it doesn't take the whole browser down with it.

There are other smaller features such as incognito browsing, where the sites you use don't show up in your history.

~My Experience~

I downloaded Chrome as soon as it became available, and was quite impressed with it. Unfortunately at that time Google had included a clause in their Terms and Conditions, which allowed Google intellectual rights over anything uploaded using their browser. As you can imagine this was an immediate no-no, there was no was I was going to let Google have the rights to my photographs just because I was using their browser.

So Chrome was deleted off my system almost as quickly as it went on. A few days later after being bombarded by complaints about the clause, Google amended it and no longer made claims to anyone else's property.

So I decided to give it another go.

For the most part I like it, it has a lot of good things going for it. The main advantage over Firefox is the speed. It is much quicker and takes up less resources than Firefox, which is great for me as I am running a Vista laptop on the bare minimum of 1gb of RAM.
I also like the fact there is no top bar for "File", "Tools" etc, meaning I get to see that little bit extra of every page. It's not much, but every little helps.

The one click bookmarking is handy, although it's not a huge problem to click twice to bookmark a page!! I haven't used the incognito browsing, but I can see how it might come in useful for some people, abused children or sufferers of domestic violence are the first ones that spring to mind.

The language defaulted to UK English, so my spelling isn't any worse than when I use Firefox with the UK dictionary. Although it makes me chuckle that Google comes up as an incorrectly spelled word unless you add it to the dictionary.

The only thing I don't like about it is that I can't use my little add-ons that I have through Firefox. Adverts don't seem to be a problem, so I don't know if there is an internal adblocker (I can't imagine why Google would do that, since it's their own ads that get blocked the most).

The main ones I miss are colorzilla because I'm terrible are remembering the hexadecimal colour codes, and Smiley Xtra 4, because I'm a real saddo and like using smiley faces.

The other main problem is the search. Because there is no search box, you can't have the drop down list of search engines that you can have in Firefox. It is possible to add extra search engine, for instance I have added HomePage Friends, but you have to specify a default search engine. So at the moment HPF is my default engine, but it is nowhere near as good as Google. So where in Firefox I could search with HPF and in one click change the search engine to Google to actually get a result, I now have to search with HPF, then go to options, change the default browser and then search again with Google.

According to the clever people at the various computer magazines, both Chrome and the newer versions of Firefox have some security issues, but both are being worked on, and there are privacy issues with Chrome.

So all in all, Chrome is a decent browser, but there are a few niggles with it. I think it'll be my secondary browser until they start releasing the promised add ons.

Summary: Worth a gander

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