Chromed

Tonight I've been mostly playing around with Google's new browser Chrome. My normal browser use is split between Opera and Firefox. I have Safari for testing and Apple mobile, but it's so hideously slow that it doesn't get used for day to day stuff on my Windows systems.

I like the page text search function in Firefox, but Opera runs faster. Other users may disagree on the speed comparison, especially since FF3 is much improved speed-wise, but Opera still seems to run faster on my systems. It seems Chrome has the best of both worlds here, but I need to tweak it (and especially the security settings) to get it running the way I want.

The installation is a breeze, but one slight annoyance is that it won't load Firefox or Opera bookmarks: IE favorites only.

The first thing that hits you is the interface: its definitely of the minimalist school (below), an address/search bar, a couple of icons and that's about it. A nifty new toy is the 'Icognito' window. Pages viewed using an Incognito window won't be recorded in your browser history and any cookies loaded during a window session will automatically be cleared when the Incognito window closes.

Tabbed browsing is here to stay and Chrome uses tabs, but in a different way. Each tab runs in its own thread, which means more system resources being used, but it also means that if one tab fails due to dodgy page scripting then you only loose the tab, not the whole browser session.

I've written this post using Chrome, and it seems that it kills Blogger's click and drag image resizing function which is a bit annoying, as I thought Google would have produced a browser fully compatible with their own blogging tool, but perhaps I need to explore a bit more.

From what I've seen so far I don't think Firefox, IE or Opera have much to worry about from Chrome. For me it'll be an interesting toy. However, if Google throw development resource at it (as they've contributed to FF), it may one day become a contender.