First Impressions of Google Chrome
Sep 2nd, 2008 by Nick
Well, Google Chrome is out, if you don’t know what it is then skip this blog for now and instead go visit here first. I have been running Chrome since google turned the download site on earlier today and I must say that I am impressed. We utilize google apps for domains at work, most users have no clue they just use outlook like they did with our old service and go on with their lives. I however do not, I utilize everything google has to over via the web browser. I gave up on IE 6/7/8 a LONG time ago, too big, too bloated and no features. Firefox 1 was nice, FF2 brought a bunch of plug-ins which made my life easier but with those plug-ins FF became much less stable and would use a hugh amount of memory over time. FF3 had fixed many of these issues but it just randomly crashes, I get the lovely java tab lockup issue and java/java scripts just seem slow. So i gave Chrome a shot, from the comic book that google released it appeared that they had basically started from scratch and re-built the web browser from the ground up. Java was supposed to work much faster/better, crash management was better and the browser was finally going to be multi-threaded.
As usual, google did not disappoint, Chrome is much faster than FF or IE. I go to tmy google apps email and gmail pops up quickly, users working in a google docs spreadsheet no longer see refresh issues like we saw in FF, spreadsheets fully load in less time than it takes to even load MS Excel and the overall layout is so plain and clean that even FF3’s minimal UI looks cluttered. I have actually worked to try and crash this browser, I had 20 tab’s open, my computer was acting a little slow but never did it crash, large graphics, nothing, finally I was able to make a tab crash after I gave up and I was upset thinking I would loose all of my tabs but instead it simply closed the single tab having issues and all was well.
Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t things that I dislike. First, no plugin’s yet, I miss many of my FF plugins, the biggest being the GTDInbox plugin. Second, well…um…crap, that’s really it actually, I miss my FF plug-ins.
I do like that fact that Google has made this all open-source for everyone to use, at first it seemed like an odd thing for them to do, however, what is google’s business?? The web, they have made an empire out of makeing search simple, getting content users need and makeing users depend on the web. Sure people have made improvements to browsing since the early 90’s, but nobody has just stopped and started from scratch, re-written the browser into what we need today instead of just cobbling things together from code written in the 90’s. That’s what Google did, we all knew Java was slow as fuck, we all knew that it sucked when your browser with 5 tabs opened just crashed and took everything with it, we all know that the three browsers(IE, Mozilla, Opera) all had features that we liked and wished our favorite browser had. Google took that and just threw it all into a blender, plug-ins will be there someday, it’s just too new for developers to have anything just yet. The great thing about google makeing this open source is that there is no reason why IE, Opera, or Mozilla can’t take feature x, y or z and put it into their browser as well. And that’s google’s point, because at the end of the day they make money on people using the web, they don’t care how you view it, just as long as you view it and click a few adword’s in the process.
Thanks Google, I’m sure I’ll find more that I dislike but the speed improvments and crash management have made me not really care.
