Google Chrome First Thoughts
This is a follow-up to the last post about the Chrome announcement, since Chrome is now officially out and available at www.google.com/chrome
I was pretty excited to try it out after researching why Google decided to build a web browser, and how they set it apart from what is already available. There have been lots of reviews by people that are probably much more qualified than me to be reviewing it so I won’t go into too much detail, just my first initial impressions, what they did right, and what I think it still lacks…so here we go!
Speed – Very good. Chrome is FAST. I couldn’t actually believe how fast it was, and why Firefox and IE are so much slower, I mean they have been doing this a lot longer, what’s the deal? Pages load very quickly, and I have not found a site yet that gets butchered in this browser like the IE bugs with CSS, etc. For this reason alone I have started using Chrome to surf, not exclusively but I probably use it more than IE at this point while Firefox is still my main browser mainly due to some web developer plug-ins.
User Interface – Very good as well. In classic Google style it is very minimal but works. They seem to nail this pretty well in all their applications. When IE7 came out I think they were going for a minimalistic approach as well but they totally missed the boat. Things are just not intuitive like they are in Chrome. That goes for the whole MS Office 2007 suite of applications too as far as I’m concerned but that is merely my opinion.
Pet peeves/Quirks – Three things really stand out in my mind about Chrome and why I won’t be making it my primary browser until they address these (and those web developer plug-ins!):
First off, the pop-up blocker sucks. It doesn’t block the pop-ups it just sticks them at the bottom of the window and they don’t go away until you click the “x” to close the dialog box. WTF? I remember when the Google toolbar came out for IE (before Firefox was even around) the pop-up blocker was probably the best feature of their whole toolbar! That was ground breaking and they did it really well. Just a quick noise that a pop-up had been blocked, and a counter to tell you how many it had blocked…brilliant! Why didn’t they keep that methodology? To Chrome’s credit, you can go into the options section and tell it not to notify you but that should have been the default option so you didn’t have to root around to find it.
Second, and this is somewhat trivial, but for me a big miss…when you have multiple tabs open and you close the window it closes all your tabs with no warning and then closes Chrome. One of the more user-friendly features in Firefox (and hell even IE although they likely stole the idea from FF) is the dialog box that pops up when you are closing a window with multiple tabs…it warns you and you can turn that warning off for subsequent closings if you prefer not to be bothered. For people like me this has been a huge feature because I often absentmindedly click the “x” when I want to close the browser page I’m on. Probably forced habit from so many years of tabless browsing, but I really do it all the time out of habit. Every time Firefox pops that message up I thank it profusely for being smarter than me and politely reminding me I am about to lose a bunch of work unless I click cancel and only close the tab I want to get rid of…A+ for the forward thinkers at Firefox 
Chrome does not seem to care that much about my productivity, because it very eagerly kills every tab open with no warning at all and leaves me sad. yes this is mainly a feature I prefer because I’m an idiot, but I’m sure there are a lot of idiots out there like me…Google, please protect us from ourselves in this regard!
Third, and this is the biggy on the list for me, and the reason I have actually stopped using Chrome for a while depending on what I’m surfing…flash support…it sucks. I mean YouTube videos don’t even play correctly 1/2 the time. I really thought they would have tested that out a bit more given the fact that they OWN YouTube. Any site I’m on that has embedded videos seems to choke when the video is played. Sometimes it just doesn’t play, sometimes it locks the whole browser up for 30+ seconds and that really irritates me. The other pet peeves I can live with, but going backwards in functionality is something I am not willing to do especially with how much video and flash content is out there.
That’s my take, I will keep playing around with it, and am still optimistic on Chrome’s future, it has a little ways to go though. Did I mention it is wicked FAST?