Promises much, delivers littles (Google Chrome)

Member Name: iamasadlittleboy

Product:	Google Chrome
Date:	03/08/09 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's better then I.E., can run betfair

Disadvantages: Crashes, CPU hogs, no bookmarks

In late 2008 Google said hello to the browsing world competing directly with Mozilla, Safari, Opera and of course Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with the release (originally of the Beta version) of Google Chrome. The search engine giant (among other things) were expanding once more from the Email client they've provided for a few years (Gmail/Googlemail), the purchase of Youtube meaning they had a video playing site, the google docs software that allows simple use of the open office software and now into the browser field. The release was met with massive hype by those on gaming forums who quickly jumped up to declare it as the next great step in Google's world domination.
So it was on the back of this tidal wave of hype that I too bought into the idea of Chrome being the future of browsing, as a long term Opera user I'd started to recognise a few problems with my browser of choice (namely it crashed on two certain sites, one being one full of naked ladies, one being a certain betting exchange). So I was in need of a back up browser to run these, having totally despised IE for the last 6 or 7 years I wasn't going to be using that and with recent memory's of firefox from my grandfathers laptop being less than successful (they crashed on a regular basis, it ran slowly and the extensions I added caused the thing to run slower than a 1 legged sheep). So it was decided to give Chrome a try and see the results of this over hyped part of the Google machine.

Chrome was easy enough and quick to download (though memory of how long it took isn't in my head any more it wasn't long) and it was fully installed within an hour or so. So with slight excitement I loaded it up and sure as it was said, it ran fine was quick to load pages too and the tabs of which I was so used to were still there. It should have been a dream come true, browsing heaven a fast well executed browsing experience that had been stripped of all the things that slowed it down...right?
Well not exactly, the browser seemed to (like every other one) have flaws of it's own, no normal bookmarking system was the first thing, though not being able to drag favourites to the tool bar (the browser doesn't really have an area to drag things too like Opera) was just the start of things. Then realisation the browser didn't haven't built in gestures (for example in Opera hold the right mouse button and click the left to go back a page) was another flaw with the browser that I again didn't much like.

Then one of the cardinal sins of any browser, it crashed when I was working, now any and every browser can crash, at really poor times, however once or twice can be an accident. It was when it was happening once or twice every day that it had started to become apparent this wasn't stable enough, the scripts on several big sites were causing the browser to crash time after time after time. Now I'd started to realise I was going to have to run two browsers anyway so I decided that the original reason for this to be downloaded (back up browser) was the only reason for it to be on my laptop.
Now and again though, I've found myself highly annoyed at this browser, it has the ability to drag tags out into windows (a good idea) though it almost always find me doing it be complete accident loading up windows I don't want. This then slows the computer down and gives me a total nightmare running effectively 3 browsers (2 Chrome and 1 opera) when I'd rather have just 1 running.

Worst of all when tabs were closed from the browsers, they were still running inside the computer (see the image at the bottom of the article), where 1 browser was causing 4 tasks and only running 2 tabs. This was whilst Opera was running 6 tabs in 1 task, (going back to the picture, which was taken at 20 mins before this was written):
Operas 1 task was using 261,960 of the memory and 0% of the CPU
Chrome's 4 tasks 85,568 of the memory and a massive 35% of the CPU
Now I'm no computer whizz, but I'm thinking the computer can cope with the memory uses a lot easy than it was coping with 1 program hogging 35% of the CPU which could have been explaining the huge slow down I was going through at the time.

So the browsers promises of slim line and fast browsing was a lie, it was fast when it was just opened, though sadly it becomes a resource hog that crashes when it fails to get it's own way and manages to become rather annoying by not closing properly. The next release hopefully will take care of some of the problems of the browser, otherwise I'll likely move back to using firefox as a back up browser.
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/5378/chromep.j pg

Summary: Doesn't suit me ideally

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