Google Chrome review

Google Chrome touts itself as a completely new browsing experience, built from the ground up to meet the needs and challenges of a modern, content-rich Internet. The Chrome team even published a comic book explaining all of the technical and security improvements that they made. For me, those things are fine and good, but unless the browser is fast, easy to use, and looks good, I won’t use it. I took Google Chrome for a test drive to see how it performed doing every day tasks.

Here’s a round-up of the Google Chrome features.

• Drag-and-drop tabbed browsing — tabs can be dragged out of windows or combined into a single window
• Enhanced Javascript engine (called V8) that runs complicated web pages more efficiently
• Each tab is its own process, so if one tab crashes the others are unaffected
• “Incognito” mode that hides your web history and blocks cookies
• Built-in Google Gears for offline access to web services
• Shortcuts you can place on your desktop that will launch an independent window to any web service, like your email, calendar, etc.
• An “Omnibar” that can be used to type in url’s as well as perform searches. The Omnibar also remembers everything you type for later.
• A new tab start page that shows your top 9 most visited sites and a list of your most frequent searches.
• Pop-ups are suppressed unless you choose to drag out the pop-up window
• Download manager controls downloads from the bottom of the window

Some of those features should seem familiar. Almost all those features are currently available in Firefox, either built-in or through add-ons. But it’s nice to see Google incorporate these popular features automatically. It also makes sense for Google to incorporate search into the url bar, although some might not like this option due to privacy issues. For people who use a lot of Google services (like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc.) Chrome will integrate seemlessly with those services.

I thought Chrome was very usable, and I liked the clean, minimalistic look and feel. I appreciate Google’s work on speed and security, but I still wouldn’t use it if it didn’t look good. Even though it is one of the simplest features, I thought the new tab page was one of the better features, and no other browser has a feature just like it.

Google Chrome is open source, so at some point it will have add-ons like Firefox. But Google warns that the add-ons might compromise some of its security design, so we’ll have to wait and see how Google makes it all work. For me, the ability to freely customize my browser is an absolute must. Chrome is pretty responsive, although it wasn’t as fast on my computer (a Dell Inspiron) than many people have reported, and the scrolling was somewhat jerky. I would place it a little behind Firefox 3 in speed, especially with lots of tabs open, but the difference is slight. My first impression is that Chrome is nothing earth-shaking, but it is a great start for a brand new browser.

Peter