The giants are at it again

I started using this thing the moment I heard it was out. It's still beta and all. But it's a great start. One of the largest entities in the consumer technology industry, Google, made one more step to conquering the world. Tuesday, September 2, Google released the BETA test for their up and coming browser dubbed 'Google Chrome'.

The release of this news came after the company 'accidentally' released a full comic explaining their plan for their browser. This comic can be viewed at http://www.google.com/chrome by clicking the 'Learn more' link.

We would stress this point, it's a BETA test, meaning not all the bugs are worked out yet and they are looking for consumer feedback as to what needs to be changed or added. As a BETA we can be happy that you can at least uninstall it when you're done playing around unlike other BETAs.

Appearance:

With this browser Google has taken an interesting approach, "Out with old and In with the new". Not a revolutionary approach, but they may have gone a bit too far with what they decided to leave out.

Google has taken the browser design from scratch with a minimalist approach. For those used to the traditional layout, such as that found in Firefox, the absence of several buttons and toolbars will immediately through you off. Novice users, I believe will have a difficult time navigating the window, and the awkward positioning of the bookmark icon looks like it was thrown in at the last minute. Even the home button isn't initially there. It is a setting that must be selected.

The window itself has the feel that it belongs on a Mac. Tabs appear at the very top of the screen giving it the appearance of a file jacket. The width of the tabs is limited by the width of the screen so if you open more than a few they get really small making it difficult to navigate through them.

Performance & Features:

The installation took a bit longer than I would have liked but I can overlook that since it quickly made up for by importing all of my Firefox bookmarks and such quickly 'n' easily. Loading page to page and rendering images to screen is comparable to what you would expect from Firefox 3.0, so we can congratulate them on that.

There were some problems with streaming video especially when they were multiple tabs open. Even though Google boasts that they have solved most memory leak issues, the way they have designed each tab to be an individual process takes up too much memory for the average computer. The smart address bar seems a step below the one in Firefox 3.0, but it gets the job done.

Security, one of the most focused upon aspects of Chrome performs well but we'll see how well it goes when people start targeting their malware at the browser. The download manager could use some work and just initially seems out of place.

Final Opinions:

Great start, but it's still a way off. Even though this is an open source application, and it has all these security and memory management wonders, we have already seen these things well executed in Firefox 3. I'm hoping that more will come to the interface. I don't need clutter but I wouldn't miss some of the feel from an older browser.

And, we really hope the issue with the tabs and memory will be resolved. All in all, this is no revolution just another option. I don't see myself leaving Firefox anytime soon but knowing something as well designed is out there gives security to users.