Review: Google Chrome

You may have heard, but chances are you didn’t try it out. Google released it’s own web browser a few days ago called Chrome. I decided to install it today, and was quickly frustrated and gave up. Did I give it a real chance? Not really. But it was not a pleasant experience. While several of the features are very cool and innovative, others are severely lacking and annoying.

Wins:

  • Each tab runs as it’s own process. This is useful if a page causes something to crash, the whole browser doesn’t eat it too.
  • Tabs are listed ABOVE the URL bar. This is useful because it keeps things more organized, and easier to read, in my opinion.
  • When you start a new tab, it shows your recently viewed pages, complete with thumbnails. While this isn’t all that spectacular, it’s pretty neat.
  • Incognito mode. This is kinda cool, as it lets you keep all systems normal and run one window that doesn’t save any information about your session.

However, there were a lot of things that I didn’t like.

Opps:

  • In most applications (including Firefox and IE) when you click the center wheel button on your mouse, a small circle appears with up and down arrows inside. When you move ABOVE the circle icon, the page scrolls up. When you go BELOW it, it goes down. Simple, right? Well this was not available at all.
  • The customization options are very minimal.
  • Java does not work. I had to install two different versions of the Java Runtime in order to get a game to play, and it still didn’t work right. The applet ended up not responding, and I had to quit. Annoying.
  • No plugins. Anyone who’s used Firefox will agree that it needs plugins. Like AdBlock.

Basically, it’s a nice idea, but it’s not for everyone. I will stick with Firefox for now because it does what I want it do, even if it does take up enough memory for three people’s browser session. I won’t say don’t use it, but I will say don’t get your hopes up.

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