Google Chrome Review
Did you hear ? Google have released a new browser. It’s called Google Chrome and is free to download.
So why have Google gone and built and open source browser when there’s already a great open source browser – Firefox. Google have offered their reasons as only Google can – through the medium of comic. Check it out here.
Well we’ve been playing with Chrome for a few days now and we’re pretty impressed. The interface is slick and Google Chrome is able to render pages quickly and accurately.
It seems the main reason Google developed Chrome was to improve the way that browsers run Web Applications such as Google Docs, Google mail and Google Reader. At the moment browsers like IE and Firefox have a single thread of processing which means that if you Gmail crashes in one Tab it brings the whole browser down with it. Chrome is different. Chrome runs everything as separate threads preventing one rogue application crashing the entire browser. This also means that Chrome is super fast when using Java based apps, most of which are served by Google. Google Docs and Gmail fly along effortlessly and you can visibly see the difference when comparing them between browsers.
Chrome has some other cool features too. The tab home page is dynamically created from your most visited sites. The address box is also a search. In fact it seems you can type whatever you want in there and Chrome will do its best to find it for you. Its also got an incognito mode (dubbed porn mode on the web) which allows you to browse around shady sides of the internet safe in the knowledge that no trace will be left on your machine.
However – I’m still using Firefox as my main browser. I do love Google Chrome - however I love Firefox more. The main plus for staying with Firefox is the huge range of plugins available, many of which I simply can’t live without.
All in all it’s a promising start for Chrome, but for now I’ll stick to Firefox.
