My take on Google Chrome
Posted 30 Sep 2008 by Akinwale Ariwodola
Around the beginning of this month, the Internet was ablaze with rumours about Google planning to release a new browser, and they eventually turned out to be true. Google released Chrome on September 2, and like every web developer/technology enthusiast, I had to get my hands dirty with it. When I initially found out about Chrome, I was rather sceptical, because I thought like every web developer would, "Great. Yet another browser to support." Designing web page layouts so that they look the same across different browsers isn't fun because of the vast differences in the ways they've decided to interpret the standards.In any case, I downloaded and installed Chrome, and the first thing that got me was the speed. Google Chrome is very fast and responsive. It made IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera feel very slow. I fancied that. And a couple of other neat things caught my attention: a very clean and uncluttered interface which gives me more viewing area for web pages and the browser's task manager. I find the task manager very useful as I can use it to identify what's hogging my resources if there's any problem. I haven't tried Chrome with Java applets, though. I may be wrong, but I recall reading somewhere that the Java plugin wasn't supported yet in the beta release.
Chrome isn't without its flaws though. The first major thing the interface needs is a title bar. I admire the way the tabs are positioned, but I don't like having to hover my mouse over a tab to show me the full title of the page that I'm currently on; I want to be able to see that at all times. On Vista, when I run apps that need to switch to Aero Basic from Aero, the top-right side of the interface gets rather jumbled. This is not pleasant to look at and needs to be fixed. Additionally, after you leave the browser running for a long period of time minimised, there is a noticeable problem when you switch between tabs. The page for the tab you switch to is initially blank, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds before the page for that tab actually displays, which is not acceptable. I've also noticed slowdowns when the browser is left running for a long period of time.
In conclusion, I do fancy Chrome. It's a neat, fast browser. And I'll be looking forward to the final release which definitely has to be improved. However, I'm going to beat up the next set of people that use the term, "browser-based OS" when referring to Chrome, or any phrase that implies something like that for that matter.
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