Chrome mania

A lot has been written this week about Google’s recent foray into the browser market. Been using Chrome for a week or so now and have to admit that I like it a lot. I’ve always been an IE user and over the last couple of years I’ve tried Firefox, Safari, Opera – I tried to like them – really I did! But none of them offered anything sufficient to tempt me away from IE. I know Firefox is technically a great product and has a legion of fans particularly in the geek world – but for some reason it just never did it for me!

Chrome does not have a huge array features – it’s pretty basic – but perhaps that’s why I like it.

Here’s what I like :-

Speed. It loads quicker than a scalded cat! My biggest criticism of IE & FF is that they often feel sluggish. I don’t want my browser to do things – I just want it to quickly & efficiently display web sites that do things. As a very subjective test on my laptop – three icons sitting on my quick launch bar. Time to open  :-

IE – 2/3 seconds
FF – 2 seconds
C – <1 second

Omnibox. The strangely named address bar along the top works VERY well. Using this single box to access history, web sites, search engine etc is a huge timesaver – and yes I know FF has something extremely similar.

Shortcuts. Again, not unique to Chrome by any means but worth a look at this list of shortcuts to make sure you’re getting most out of it.

Reliability. It hasn’t crashed yet! For a beta product on it’s first public release that’s pretty impressive – and more than IE can boast with it’s release version! Each tab runs in it’s own process which should help keep errant web sites in their  own box!

Compatibility. Is pretty good. In the past this was always what brought me back to IE. However most sites seem to display accurately. There are still some sites that only work properly in IE – Outlook Web Access being the one I use most.

Launch pad. Quite like the “Opera like” speed dial interface on the main page – provides a neat way to load common sites very quickly.

For a first attempt at a browser this really is impressive – it’ll be interesting to see how the product develops over the next year. Although even if it never makes it mainstream it’s probably already paid Google just in the additional ad revenue generated by the extra web traffic of us all talking about it!

They guys at PC Pro also seem to like it a lot. David Feardon gets a bit of flack for his comparison to an Operating System. This ain’t no Operating System – that’s a crazy suggestion (as many commenters point out!) – but I do sort of understand what he’s getting at. Over the next few years the “operating system” may well find itself relegated to an interface layer between hardware & browser.

For now – I’m using Chrome for daily web browsing – and IE for the odd site which isn’t happy in Chrome.