Google Chrome has arrived... and its good!
Today Brian Rakowski announced the launch of Google’s new browser, Chrome. After teasing us yesterday with a great comic book strip explaining what it is, how it works and the ideas behind it they finally opened up downloads at around 8pm(GMT).
The Good
- Its fast! Websites seems really snappy. Ive yet to run any benchmarks yet but I can see it beating Firefox and Safari in all areas
- Lightweight. I was a bit unsure of having multiple processes running all over my machine but they seem to managed well. RAM usage can get a bit high with multiple tabs open but with just GMail open its only using 17mb (vs FF3’s 112mb)
- Standards compliant. It’s got WebKit under the hood so this was expected really.
The bad
- The installation procedure is awful. Why do I have to download a 500k setup file which then in turn downloads the installation file and extracts it to a random location on my hard drive. Getting installation right is very important as it’s often the first interaction a user will be having with your application.
- Im running Windows XP and the GUI is some kind of Vista hybrid (just like Windows Live Messenger). Although its fairly minimal it does annoy me.
- They’ve adopted the IE7 style of doing away with the File, Edit, Help menu and placing it all under one icon. At least give us the option to change it back guys.
- No “Add to dictionary” feature when you right click on a misspelled word. Bit of an oversight really.
The good points really do outweigh the few bad points mentioned here. I feel guilty dropping Firefox after championing it for so many years but it has become bloated and unstable.
I’ll be looking forward to new updates and plugins over the coming weeks.