Google Chrome - First Look

Google Chrome. The new browser from the Google team is out and am blogging from it. Here are my some first (random) thoughts about it after using it for 4 hours.

• Simple design and fast in loading the pages.
• It doesn’t look great with no toolbar and menu bar. People who were used to clicking home buttons will have a problem with this.
• It failed to import my settings from my live Firefox. I didn't want to close it.
• The idea of running a multithread for every tab doesn’t look so great with many processes running.
• Open in incognito window is already there in Firefox3. So it isn’t a new feature.
• A little delay when opening a new tab when you have more window previews in Most Visited.
• The autocompletion of URLs work as same as the Awesome bar of Firefox3.
• I will have to try out the bookmarks bar on a new window. It looks cool.
• Opening a new tab with "+" button is very easy. It still follows the firefox shortcuts to open and close the tabs. The tabs are shown above the URL bar.
• The “Press [Tab]” option to search for a string in the website which you have typed in URL is very cool.

That said, it has got its own advantages and disadvantages at this beta stage. It can be a very good alternative to IE but it will take ages to beat Firefox. With Google renewing the relationship with Mozilla Foundation till 2011 and a strong response from John Lily, my fingers crossed for the next version of Firefox. Now let me go and have a look at this.

Update: When I was about to publish this post, Chrome went to non-responding mode and popped out a small dialog to stop the Shockwave player and after stopping that, I got back the control.

Update 2: Mozilla is back with a sneak preview of Firefox version 3.1 alpha, which shows the performance of TraceMonkey faster than V8 (the Javascript engine used in Chrome).