Google Chrome – My First Impressions

Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 21:12

Today I downloaded Chrome, which is Google’s new web browser. The reason I did so was because I had been a little upset with FireFox lately. For some reason my favorite web browser keeps shutting down on me and I can’t seem to find the reason.

Like many, I didn’t really expect much of Chrome. I think I am one of many who expected Chrome to be a basic browser developed only because Google can’t stand not being involved with browsers.

Now how can this stand up to FireFox ?

However after using Chrome all day long today, I have actually come to like it. And I am starting to like it more and more.

Here are the things that I noticed about chrome during a 1 day test drive :

Very Fast Web Browsing – It’s the first thing I noticed. Chrome makes use of the open source Webkit project, in order to render web pages with high speed. This is also used by Safari.
It looks clean and simple – It does not look like IE or FF, so this needs a little getting used to for me. I like the simple aspect. Going through all the settings and options in IE or FireFox has never been my favorite thing to do. Chrome is very accessible.
The hot keys are as I expect. CTRL-D for bookmarks, ALT-D for highlighting the address bar, CTRL-W for closing a window etc.
It didn’t hang on me the entire day. I switched to FireFox because Internet Explorer was driving me nuts. Now for some reason FireFox started hanging on me as well.
There are no addons. Of course this will need some time, as the browser is new and still in BETA.
The home page ‘most visited‘ sites idea is actually pretty ok with me. I usually let my browser open on Google.com, then I press the short cut buttons at the top of FireFox. As a web worker I have fixed web surfing patterns and this idea worked pretty well for me on this day.

Google Chrome – My Verdict

Although its BETA and it’s weird to use a Google web browser, I must say that I get the feeling that Google has plans for this browser. It feels as if they have thought things through pretty well with Chrome. In time I’m sure that addons will be available for it as well. That’s when it starts getting interesting. Hopefully it will still run without errors.

A web browser is one of the most important pieces of software available in an operating system. It’s our window to the web and an interface to many offline and online applications. I believe that this is the reason that we can count on Google going all out on this one.

What are your First Impressions of Google Chrome ?

I could have gone out on a limb here and written an in depth review about Chrome, but that’s already been done. what I’m more interested in is your opinion on practical use. First impressions count in this case.

If you’ve used Google Chrome already, be sure to add your first impressions as a comment below. Have you experienced bugs ? What do you like ? What don’t you like ?