Quick Post from Chrome

3rd September

So as I’m sure a fair number will know Google launched there browser yesterday, this is just a quick post from it.

I jumped on the bandwagon fairly early yesterday when my RSS feed was full of stories of this strange new browser but alas I didn’t actually get time to use it yesterday. Work and life got in the way, such is the way of things but now the office is quiet and so a few minutes have presented themselves.

First impressions are it’s fast and I really like the way when it’s maximised you get a lot more of a website than in Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF), in fact it is very similar to the full screen modes in those browsers. The new tab having thumbnails of most visited sites is quite nice and I could see that coming in handy.

The GUI, hmm, I’m not convinced it reminds me too much of the default Gnome blue theme in many Linux distributions that I’ve never been a big fan of but this is a beta and with a bit of luck they may add theme options like FF. In fact I think that is probably the reason I couldn’t switch right now, add-ons. I use so many in FF, at least 5 regularly and 3/4 when working on more specific things. Then again, a lot of these are for checking Google services such as Gmail and Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice) and so in future releases it wouldn’t surprise me if these were more tightly tied in so maybe I could one day see myself using this browser over FF but I think I would prefer to see FF just incorporate some of the features of Chrome.

I’m a big fan of Mozilla and FF and a big fan of what they have acheived and I don’t really want to see Chrome eat into that but pulling some user away from IE, that, that would be nice…

Dan

**edit**

Apparently this post now belongs to Google…

10 Responses to “Quick Post from Chrome”

Jon
3rd September 2008
9:56 am

I completely agree with everything you said there Dan, however I found it no quicker than my Firefox (which is running “no script” “add block plus” and other things in the background). The thumbnails of recently visited sites, and search history, is great! It is what iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) should be like, instead of the horrible thing the have recently released! But the one thing I wish Firefox took from chrome is that lovely fact when you maximize you have such a lovely amount of website on the screen.

Jason
3rd September 2008
6:42 pm

I like it. It is marginally faster than FF but it was the really long comic on their website that impressed me about the underlying techs. Its about time tabs were different threads. Anyone who has ever had problems with massive JavaScript apps (such as Digg) or flash apps will know.

I do not like the EULA though. I wonder if that was just a copy past job from a web based service where this is common?

Toni
4th September 2008
7:29 am

It was good for me at work, in that it slipped under the corporate ‘IE6 ONLY’ protection that prevents me (mostly ;-)) from installing other browsers. And it’s light years ahead of THAT browser.

Just remember it’s a beta, and don’t make secure transactions etc using it – someone will have hacked it in a few days for sure.

Dan
4th September 2008
8:59 am

Jay – I thought the comic was great as well, the only thing I couldn’t get over was the fuss about tabs being there own threads. It’s very, very rare that FF crashes on me or struggles but then I very rarely use flash on sites.

Toni – You may have seen already on the Reg but it’s already fallen foul of one problem with WebKit. Safari plugged it a while back but looks like Google haven’t been using the latest version of WebKit. Also have you thought about using standalone applications? You can get a version of FF that works very well?

Toni
4th September 2008
12:39 pm

They seem to have made something in the filing system ‘look’ for specific names. So I can’t install safari because it uses a file called safari.exe. Copying the safari.exe file in another computer and renaming it does work, but other files are obviously affected as it suffers crashes and various bugs.

What do you mean by ‘a standalone’ version? Does it come as a single executable that doesn’t install?

Dan
4th September 2008
1:52 pm

Yes, the idea behind them is that they run off of a USB stick for instance, Hopefully this will be of use:

http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

Jason
4th September 2008
5:29 pm

Dan – It depends on the user and what they use. I have in the past experienced problem because of heavy JavaScript usage on a few sites I visit and the flash use. The fact is IF something does go wrong the whole browser crashes. With chrome this is almost (apart from that security bug) a thing of the past.

Oh and apparently Google has now changed the EULA, and it was an oversight:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7597699.stm

Dan
4th September 2008
6:19 pm

Yeah I saw that on the Reg earlier, meant to update accordingly but shock horror I had some work to do!

Toni
9th September 2008
11:03 am

Well, Chrome has now been killed. Time to try that stand alone browser.

Toni
10th September 2008
9:10 am

Good call Dan – portable firefox works *mostly* in the work PC. It fails because Javascript needs to be installed (I’ll see about sorting that) and cookies appear blocked, possibly because of Javascript being unavailable. I may try running it off the desktop instead of on the dongle for a little extra speed.

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