Google Chrome – what everyone is talking about.
This has been a quick and strange announcement. I had read about it in the morning – actually watched that whole set of comics as I found the whole concept of explaining a new product through use of popuralized medium such as comics highly interesting. First thing I thought of – what about FireFox – after all Google and Mozilla have been working together for quite some time. I do understand the intention of Google to actually go and do their own thing – sometimes you have to do this to satisfy the need.
As I was about to go home, I got a link to download the Chrome in it’s beta form. Well, I have to admit – thins thing is great. At least so far I am very happy with what they have done. UI is simple and to the point – at first I thought having your tabs above the address bar is bizarre, but after couple of minutes I realized that this is where they are supposed to be – after all that’s a tab, and it has it’s own address bar and the rest. By placing it above the rest of the window, that whole point is just emphasized. According to the comics, the main thing was having multi threaded browser, where javascript would not lock up your browser, and I guess they’ve got that figured out. There are couple of sites out there where I had to switch to IE just to view the content, as FireFox would take forever to load it – with Chrome this is not an issue. Chrome is supposed to be a great platform for use with web apps as static HTML is a thing of the past, and that is a great point. Web is not going anywhere, complexity of web apps are growing exponentially and will continue to do so in the future, we need to have a new browser to accommodate these trends.
There are couple of things that I think could have been done better, but after all this is beta, and I am sure the product will be improved. For instance – after install I had to go through the dialog on importing settings from FireFox. Passwords and usernames are fine, but my bookmarks from FireFox are nowhere to be found, although to be fair I have not really conducted extensive search.
Overall Chrome is great and it will become even better as it will mature