Google Chrome Review

It’s been 2 months since the launch of Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1 is on the way with IE8 hot on the heels – So what’s the difference? Which is the one for you? Will it finally get the remaining 20% of IE6 users to drag themselves into the 21st century and stop annoying our designers? Well after 2 weeks of posting about pretty gorgeous websites I thought it was time I sunk my teeth into something a little more substantial.

Ok so first things first – why should I use this newfangled Google Chrome? Google’s a search engine, what on earth makes them think they can develop a browser?!? Well they can, and they have, and not done a bad job of it to be honest. So what are the main plus points of Chrome that I miss when using the other browsers?

• Installation is both quick and easy and with the quick start videos you’ll be ready to go within minutes.
• Transfer both your IE and Firefox bookmarks, passwords and history with one click. Better than erasing/overwriting them like Firefox did last time I ran an update.
• Much more than an address bar – Google calls this the ‘Omnibar’ it doubles as a search box and gives intellegent autocomplete search suggestions.
• Multiprocess Architecture – Nothing’s more annoying than when you have loads of tabs open then one tab crashes and takes down the whole browser – This is no longer an issue when using Chrome as all of the tabs have their own ‘sandbox’ meaning that they cannot share information between tabs – so if one goes down you can close that within Chrome and leave your other tabs running. This is also benificial when it come to security – if one tab gets attacked by malware for instance, it will only affect that tab.
• Speed – Initially I didn’t find much to shout about with regards to the speed of Chrome – definitely not as noticable as the difference between FF and IE – until I tried running a heavey java script site on one tab and my hotmail on the other. Ordinarilly the java would slow down both tabs but not in Chrome thanks to the Sandbox.