Chrome made its entry just a day back. I’d like to share what I felt after having a glance at it. Lets take a quick look.*
Installation: Downloads very fast. Installs very quickly. Very easy. ** Browser Startup: Very quick indeed. 10 times faster than ffx I’d say. Really lightning fast. Lets wait for some more features to add to it, like plugins etc.Page Loading: I don’t think browser can do much if your internet connection is screwed up.
I didn’t find any noticeable difference in terms of loading a page. For real benchmarking, test highly AJAXified sites on chrome. According to developers, V8 and WebKit would make rich internet applications work faster on chrome.
UI: Truly Awesome. Amlost no UI. All you see is your webpage. Full marks for UI engineering. All not-so-used buttons/controls (which clutter up other browser’s UI space) are safely hidden. Window’s title-bar’s space is utilized for displaying tab. Even the browser’s name is not shown anywhere on the screen. Looks like not a single pixel is wasted.
Tabs**: Extremely Felxible Tabs, Pull out of one window, Push it in other window. Secure. If one tab crashes, whole browser wont go down. (ffx3 on vista has become real pain in this regards)
Shortcuts**: common shortcuts keys should work like they work for ffx/IE. CTRL+TAB, CTRL+SHIFT+TAB, F5, CTRL+N, CTRL+T etc. (They SHOULD work, for ease of new users)
Address+Search Bar = Omnibar**: Address bar can act as search bar as well. (hmm...)
Application Shortcuts**: drag and drop web applications shortcuts on desktop (..not a great deal, at least I think so)
Well well well....you can read about more features (downloads, security, incognito window etc) on chrome’s site. Why am I wasting my time!!
one very important security flaw ** that I observed is your saved passwords are not safe with Goggle Chrome as doesn’t have Master Password. (There is a complete blog post dedicated to this issue, I won’t misuse review’s space for that. You can read it at https://kunaldabir.blogspot.com/2008/09/chrome-shows-passwords.html, if you are interested)
also, as of now, some sites are not supporting chrome nicely, eg hotmail (you can see the description on the same blog)
Conclusion**: Truly a new generation browser. Its worth giving a try. Very light weight and fast. Smart, streamlined and intuitive UI. But in the browser market, it has a long way to go.