Google Chrome – My Views and Review

Google is everywhere these days. Most of their products, or “innovations” as many people like to call them, usually get very successful. Like GMail, Orkut, Google Docs, and many more. Some time back, they decided that we, the people, need an all new browser that would redefine our browsing experience. So, here we have yet another browser. And the name is Chrome, Google Chrome.

Just a day before the launch of Chrome, a blog entry was made on the Official Google Blog on 1st September notifying the readers about the launch date of a beta of Chrome. That was when I came to know about it. So, I eagerly waited for the next day to arrive. Although I had my exam the day following the lauch date, I still preferred to wake up at night and be one of the first ones to download it.

My first attempt on downloading was when I went to the official Chrome site for it. From there, I got a 470KB executable which would download the actual Chrome browser from the Internet. As my modem has a tendency to disconnect very frequently, I made 3 unsuccessful attempts of downloading Chrome through that 470KB file. On some googling, I got a direct link to the actual Chrome installer which was around  7MB in size.

After installing, I tried Google Chrome in three operating systems – Windows Vista, Windows XP and Linux. My best experience with it was in XP. In Linux, I ran it under Wine 1.1.4 and it was running fine, but not very good. Here are my views on Chrome according to my usage till now:

• Chrome is based on the engine – Apple’s Webkit (Safari and Konqueror use it), and uses Mozilla libraries (Firefox uses it too) to implement many similar features. So, Chrome is a mix of features of Safari and Firefox with the “Google” branding on it. But Chrome developers have put in some serious efforts to make it as usable as possible.
• The interface is pretty damn cool. The tab effects are very nice. A new tab opens with a default page containing the thumbnails of most frequently visited sites.
• Chrome is extremely fast, just like Safari and Opera. Fast in both browsing as well as response.
• An interesting feature is that a website freeze would be able to affect just the tab it is in and not the whole browser. Chrome will offer to close the tab for an unresponsive site automatically.
• The interface is minilalistic and overall very usable.
• Google Chrome also integrates in it a “Task Manager” which can be accessed with the key combination “Shift + Esc”.
• As compared to Firefox, I am missing the built-in spell checker. Don’t blame me if you find any spelling errors in this post! Also, there’s no “search box”; but the address bar plays a dual role of addressing and searching. So, one has to change the preferences every time he needs to change the search engine.