10 Oct 08 Google Chrome – Worth It?
An early leak about Google’s new browser has lead to an early release (by two days) of Chrome, short for Chromium. There’s a ton of stuff being written about the new browser so I’m just going to offer a quick first impression. To set the stage, you should know that I’m comfortable with my current browser. It offers many features like blogging, social media and a useful, web clipboard for moving clipboard items to my Flickr account and other sites.
Making a switch seems far away for me, right now. But let’s see.
Finding the download was easier than finding an election or campaign article. Installation, a breeze. The default installation setting to import my settings from Internet Explorer was refreshing. I do wish my browser, Flock was listed so I kinda missed out on the whole settings import thing. My settings were imported from Firefox which is my secondary browser.
On first load, two tabs were opened. The default tab showed some empty thumbnails with a description that read in part, “The “Most visited” area shows the websites that you use most often. After using Google Chrome for a while, you will see your most visited sites whenever you open a new tab. You can learn more about this and other features on the Getting Started page.”
The second tab pointed to a welcome page with a 404 error message of sorts that read in part, “This webpage is not available. The webpage at http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en-US/welcome.html might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.”
When I clicked the “More information” link, I got the details,
Error 104 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_FAILED): The attempt to connect to the server failed.
Server must be busy? Sure enough, clicking the refresh button loaded a page, a real welcome screen outlining some new features.
The user interface is clean and feels fresh and Googley, kinda exciting, like the first time I used Flock. There’s a distinct absence of browser chrome, also refreshing The windows are intentionally chromeless to give web apps more display room. How convenient.
I won’t go into the features here but you can and probably will anyway. Each of the features has it’s own YouTube video. Which, IMO, is the fastest way to learn or get someone to try your new, online anything. The videos were succinct and instructional. Browser release 2.0.
Still having a good experience overall. Watching a video from the development team on the thinking and features behind Google Chrome.
All the normal shortcuts I use regularly, work as expected. My sites looked great within the Chromeless windows and really clean. Short of a round browser window, I like to see new design approaches.
Webmasters can get the behind the scenes, Google Chrome scoops.
Default encoding is UTF-8. Mac and Linux versions are “coming soon.” Blacklists, sandboxing for tabs and incognito mode will surely steal some thunder from the IE 8 release.
Marketers and bloggers might like the right-click, “copy link address” function which actually copies and pastes correct urls, not a Google modified link. This alone coule be enough for some folks to make the switch. You may also like the search from toolbar ability. It’s still going smoothly.
I’m writing this post in Wordpress using Chrome and haven’t noticed any difference. But it feels good and “standards” seem to be in-tact. Although a quote at Wikipedia reveals,
The first release of Google Chrome Beta (Build 1583) does not pass the Acid3 test; it scores 77/100 and does not render the image correctly.
Look for the Open Source community to stay on top of this. 77/100 is very solid and currently only slightly behind by Opera.
So my first, quick impressions are really positive. Am I willing to switch browsers yet? No, I can’t afford the time right now. But I’ll keep trying it out for the rest of the day and if things go well, I could possibly make a full switch over with a couple months. Only sweet time will tell.
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Tags: google chrome, Marketing, News, search engines
Reader's Comments
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yeah, actually I got the same errors… now I see
Yeap, too many bugs.
Also Chrome doesn’t scroll up with my touch pad’s scroll area only down and very fast.
Good test, guys! I like this kind of reviews. Do you use google chrome from now, instead of the standard one?
Yeah, I’ve tried Chrome on my laptop too, the same result…. another bug, huh?
2 Raw Cube:
No, man, I just have tried for testing purposes
I always use the standard one
As I know it’s just beta now? Am I right? I think it will be much better when full build is out.
Yeah, man, it’s just beta. I dont know about final build, but I hope it will be good!
Google Chrome really sux, I donno what’s good in it
It’s easy to use, my friends, that’s all… I like standard google as you do, but that’s not the reason to blame the new one
Google Chrome is crap. It’s idiotic to make a browser that displays websites in a bad light just because you want to hold everyone to your level of excellence.
A good browser would be the most forgiving possible — not make a mockery everything.