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Since it’s launch, Google Chrome has been the hottest thing since sliced bread in the computing world. It’s fast, it’s light weight and it’s free. What else could one ask for in a browser, right? Well, for the average Joe, nothing much.
Unfortunately, average Internet users we are not, and after a couple of hours of what we would classify as “normal usage“, we stumbled across a couple of interesting issues. We’ll be sharing some of our thoughts about this new browser after the jump.
The first thing that irked us about Google Chrome was the fact that downloading the installer wasn’t actually downloading the installer. It took less than a minute for the download to complete, but much to our chagrin, it wasn’t an installer but a download client. Why Google thought this was necessary, we will never know - but what we do know is that Mozilla doesn’t do that with Firefox. Thankfully, the download client didn’t take too long to complete the download. We clocked it at about two minutes, but with the volatility of Streamyx, please do not take our word as testament.
Upon completion, we launched the browser and it loaded up almost instantly - definitely faster than any version of Firefox we’ve ever used, but fractionally slower than a Chuck Norris round house kick. At first glance, the browser looked clean. There wasn’t a toolbar on top, nor was there a status bar on the bottom. There were no finicky menus to click through either.
As we typed a random URL (well, not that random) into the address bar, we discovered that it wasn’t just an address bar. It also doubled up as a search bar! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the default search engine is, but if you didn’t already know, it’s Google.
Page loading went pretty smoothly, but we weren‘t anal enough to actually time it against Firefox or (gasp!) IE. While reports on the net do state that Chrome isn’t exactly 100% compatible with all the Javascripts out there, we didn’t encounter any problems just yet. Flash loaded decently too, but the built-in pop-up blocker was rather pants. It blocked almost all the “friendly” pop-ups, like the kind we use in our CMS, but let a tons of intrusive pop-up and pop-under spam windows.
Like all new generation browsers, Chrome put a lot of emphasis on tabbed browsing. By double clicking on the title bar or Ctrl + T-ing, new tabs pop-up much like they do in Firefox. Again, like Firefox, you can rearrange the tabs simply by dragging them to the desired order. However, unlike Firefox, you can actually drag out these tabs to turn them into separate windows.
Whether or not you drag them out as separate windows, each tab operates as a separate process. Google says that by programming Chrome this way, this eliminates the entire browser from crashing when an individual tab faces an error.
As innovative as that sounds, Chrome is far from being perfect. One of the major defects it faces is it’s inability to process RSS feeds.
Clicking on an RSS feed in Firefox gives you this…
Whereas clicking on an RSS feed in Chrome gives you this…
The lack of a permanent status bar takes some getting used to, and up till now, I still haven’t gotten used to it yet. I don’t know if I ever will, but that’s a personal quirk of mine.
The download manager on Chrome also needs some serious work. There were many times when we clicked on a download link, waited for the “Save as…” dialogue box to pop-up, didn’t see one, and repeatedly spammed the download link in frustration. It was only when our mouse cried for mercy did we notice that the download had already started…
Now, if you haven’t already done so, click here to download Google Chrome for yourself, and if you already have, then give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back. For more official information regarding Google Chrome, click here, and to participate in our forum discussion, click here.
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