I have been playing with Google Chrome for some days now and am quite happy with it, except for a few niggles here and there, which makes me go back to Firefox every now and then.
The installation is easy and quick. You download a less than half MB installer and then fire it up for a roughly 7 MB Chrome installation.
The setup process allows you to download your preferences, settings, passwords and favourites from Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla FireFox (FF). You can choose not to import settings at that time and Chrome will allow you to import settings later.
I installed Chrome at home first, and the installation was a breeze. I had problems with the second part of the installation download (the 7 MB part) at work. I figured it was because of the proxy connection and have this suggestion to make to Google: make available a zip or exe installer for such connections, otherwise a whole lot of Internet users through enterprise proxy connections might not be able to give it a try.
Starting up Chrome for the first time was refreshing: very clean and lots of space for the content.
The translation of Google’s philosophy for the design of its Web services to this desktop application is near perfect. The tabs go on top, where you see the title bar for most other applications. There is just a single menu bar incorporating the basic back, forward, and refresh buttons, bookmark button, the omnibox, and the page and settings buttons.
The omnibox is a more powerful address bar, making suggestions for Web sites and for search.
I ran into my first gripe about three minutes into using Chrome: I was in the Google Chrome download page ( http://www.google.com/chrome) and wanted to send it to a friend, and there is no “send this link” or “send this page” option. I share a lot of links and Web pages this way and it was a big downer for me.
A few minutes later, I was on www.ted.com and downloading a video to my desktop. It was a fairly large file, around 65 MB, and I moved on to other things, in different tabs.
After a while, I was a little tired and distracted and closed the Chrome window and it just closed all the tabs and cancelled my download as well. No warning about closing/saving tabs; No maintaining a download in a separate window.
I also missed using my favourite FF extensions, especially the web developer toolbar. If you have a few extensions that you think you can’t do without, then it’s too bad for Chrome.
Of course, the browser is still in beta and, Google is likely to sort most of these problems out before the final product is released.
Nice touches too Oh, and in case you think I am becoming too critical about Chrome, it is only because of the very high expectations we tend to have for any new product or service from Google. In fact, it has quite a few things going for it.
Anecdotal evidence shows that the browser is significantly faster.
It also helps speed up the browsing experience with its new tab page that gives you a snapshot of your most visited pages, gives you a link to your history, as well as allows you to search your history.
I like that the entire browser doesn’t come to a standstill when one of the pages/tabs crashes.
You also get an “incognito” mode which is for anonymous browsing as far as leaving traces in your PC goes, meaning that no cookies, no history and no temporary files will be saved from those sessions. The data will still be available to logging applications and other snoops. This is a feature that is available in the IE 8 beta as well.
You can create application shortcuts for your Web applications such as Gmail and Google Docs, and Chrome will display those sites like a desktop application, without the address bar and navigation.
You can move a tab out into a separate window if you are the kind that likes to keep their browsing organised even as you drill down and investigate links from various Web sites.
A nice touch is that the URL in the address bar is colour-coded, with only the URL showing up in black and the rest of the address in grey. Also “https” is shown in green when you are in a secure site.
Too subtle at times Sometimes, the nice touches are too nice, too subtle. We are so used to seeing a dialog box when we initiate a download in IE or FF that when Chrome shows an unobtrusive band at the bottom of the screen after initiating a download, we tend to miss it and hit the download button a couple more times. Thankfully, that is only the default behaviour and we can make Chrome ask for the download location for each file in the “minor tweaks” tab in the options dialog under the settings menu.
I also like the extra screen space it offers to content, especially on my laptop which has a fairly small 13.3-inch screen. But I also don’t use it all the time in my laptop because I use the fingerprint software to store usernames and passwords for my most important work Web sites.
So, finally: Should you dump Internet Explorer or Firefox for Google Chrome? Not yet. Should you give it a whirl? Definitely, yes. You might like it and use it exclusively if you are not a techie or if you use a laptop with a small screen.
