Google announced Chrome yesterday and the company has already offered Windows XP and Vista owners the opportunity to try it out. And although I’ve only been able to use it for just a little while, Google Chrome is not only one of the fastest browsers I’ve ever used, it’s easily one of the best.
The Google Chrome install was quick and easy. In a matter of seconds (literally), I downloaded the application from the company’s site and installed it on my PC. Once up, Chrome asked to import the data from Firefox and I was off.
The first thing that will strike you about Chrome is its soft, yet elegant interface. Unlike other browsers, which sport clutter, Chrome doesn’t do anything of the sort. Instead, it makes tabs the primary element of the software, which can be dragged around and moved as needed on the fly. You can already do that in Safari, but in Chrome, it’s simply much easier.
Chrome also offers the “Omnibox”, which lets you input a web address or search the web in the address bar. You can do that now with Firefox, as well, but if you’re visiting a specific site like Amazon and you want to search that site, it features smart search engine detection to let you search Amazon instead of Google. I did just that on Amazon.com and it worked extremely well. In fact, it was much easier to search through sites and pages than any other browser I typically use.
My favorite feature so far in Chrome is the homepage. Unlike every other browser on the market, Chrome gives you a list of all the most-visited pages you’ve been to. I found this to be extremely useful. Instead of wasting time sifting through favorites or trying to find a specific page, I had all my most visited pages at my disposal when I opened Chrome up.
But perhaps more than anything, you’ll notice just how fast Chrome is immediately. After just ten minutes of jumping from site to site, I was amazed by how quickly I was able to get around. And unlike some browsers (I won’t mention any names), opening a slew of tabs doesn’t matter — it’s just as fast with or without tabs.
For those that want to shop for their girlfriend’s engagement ring without them knowing or just want to do, um, other things, Chrome also features an incognito mode, which will stop the browser from recording your activity. I tried it out and it works as advertised, and was delighted to see that I could turn it on and off in a flash.
One of my biggest problems with Firefox is that I have a tendency to lose my downloads when I get a little overzealous in my software tastes. Granted, you can go to the “Downloads” tab and find everything there, but Chrome makes it easier: it has a download box at the bottom of the screen that lets you access your downloaded files and put them where they need to go. I doubt I’ll lose anything again.
But not everything is perfect in Chrome. It’s still not available for Mac OS X and Linux users and it’s missing an easy method for organizing bookmarks. Worse, it currently doesn’t offer any way to email links. Google claims it’s just a beta release and these functions will be added in subsequent versions, but I still would have liked to see them in the first iteration.
All in all, Google Chrome, after just a little time using it, is superb. It’s not only fast, but it’s useful. It’s not only elegant, but it understands what you really want to do with a browser. And although it suffers from some setbacks that shouldn’t be overlooked, it’s still a highly-capable browser. Download Chrome. You won’t regret it.
Most impressive is that this is a beta release, that was not even supposed to have been made public yet. Knowing that Google is known for keeping things in beta for years, imagine when this becomes 1.0
http://www.twitter.com/A_F
People frequently question Google’s ability to take a product to 1.0, but this project is fundamental to their operations and I have no doubt that this will grow far beyond that. The community at large have speculated, others have predicted for years, that this was on the way.
I suppose that, when asked a couple of years ago, Eric Schmidt was not lying when he said “we are not working on a browser”. Technically, they are just wrapping an existing project and plugging in a new JS VM, right?
Web application developers, rejoice! The browser is multi-process! My site is not your site! It feels like the dawn of a new age in computing, only just like the last one.
It doesn’t even support Unicode. How lame is that. Even Explorer can do that. FAIL!
Supposed to be this in the address bar.
楽天証券.com
Shows this.
http://xn--zcrz2ojwod24a.com
Yes, I was hoping Chrome support Unicode but very disappointed that it isn’t.
google for sun spoder javascript benchmark test to compare chrome and firefox
giving people structured standardized uniform content is not googls forte. prime example: 7 million results for techcrunch search term with the new googlesuggestions system. 7 would have been fine. googl wants to keep you confused. anything for a page click or view. if they wanted to help people they would market chrome on there homepage and change the name to “my browser.” imagine the next confusing name app they come up with will be called “copper” or “tin” how about “pewter”. they like to dabble in the future reality of search but they wont promote it. being efficent with structured uniform user generated search habits with the use of a browser can be what puts googl out of business. they know it. do you?
Great test…Chrome is scary on this one: On my machine: IE6 canned out completely, Safari was 2 times slower than the speed of Chrome, Opera was 2.5 times, Flock was 7 times and Firefox was 6.5 times slower than it.
I did notice that it ‘nibbles’ a bit at CPU resources though, even in idle mode.
I guess it comes down to features or speed, but think this is excellent in widening the choice in browsers.
i think the author of this article has obviously never tried Opera browser. chrome is a joke compared to Opera’s features. one simple example every browser lacks (including Chrome) but Opera is a “Paste and Go” feature in the address bar (so useful, saves a lot of time) or how about saving ’sessions’…
sorry, but i’ll stick to Opera, not only the fastest but coming with the most features, including the download feature you mentioned. google is trying to reinvent the wheel haha
Chrome doesn’t even feature dropdown bookmark buttons. pathetic.
Chrome has paste and go
Opera is no where near the fastest, what are you basing that on?
i’ve found opera slower on most of the sites i’ve been using
plus chrome has a better speed-dial page
Thanks for the spam, Andrew.
Doesn’t seem like people have really tested everything before making judgments – I’m still messing around with it during my lunch break. So far:
1) The task manager/”Stats for Nerds” shows you the memory/network usage for different tabs/windows, and even shows the memory usage for other browsers. Not sure how useful this is, and it might just be the novelty, but I thought it was pretty cool. If this can close unresponsive windows without needing to use Windows Task Manager to kill the whole Browser, that’d be REALLY useful.
2) I’m pretty unimpressed with the whole “Launch App from Desktop”. Basically a bookmark from your desktop cept it takes away the search bar/other browser elements. Can’t really think of very many instances when this is that useful. Only one I can think of is their example – streamlining access to webmail (but who uses that anymore?)
3) Someone mentioned that at a baseline, Chrome uses more memory than Firefox, but also seems to scale better when you have more tabs/windows open than FF does. I’ll do more testing with this when I have time.
1) Yes.
2) I have personally used it on a music (playing) site, on Google Calendar, and a few other sites.
3) Does seem to handle a ton of windows pretty well without slowing down.
“Only one I can think of is their example – streamlining access to webmail (but who uses that anymore?)”
Umm…you’re kidding, right? Possibly the biggest trend right now in software is the movement of client applications into the cloud, and email is one of the best examples of that.
Uhm, did everyone griping Chrome out forget it’s in BETA? Better you READ the status of the browser again before passing judgement. Sheesh! Get a life, people or go back to M/S’s table and ask for more. I’l be glad to see the Linux versin of this when it comes out. Gripe about that now.
Well, Gmail is still in “BETA”! A private beta, or downloading a nightly build is another thing, but releasing a software for the public to download means that the “Beta” label is just a label, Google has already decided that the software is ready for the general public.
It’s just based on Mozilla.
What do you mean by “based”?
I thought it was running the WebKit rendering engine?
look in “About”, Mozilla/5.0
Mine says:
Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
Do the same with IE’s useragent and you’ll also find a Mozilla in it.
Yup, definitite proof that IE is based on Firefox!
…
YOU DUMB IDIOTS – wannabe techies – it just a user-agent string.
RTFW. http://en.wikip...wiki/User_agent
“The earliest example of this is Internet Explorer’s use of a User-Agent string beginning “Mozilla/ (compatible; MSIE …”, in order to receive content intended for Netscape Navigator, its main rival at the time of its development.”
Have to agree. Using it right now, and it’s the fastest browser I’ve ever used.
because you’ve never tried opera
I have… and its faster than opera for me.
Opera sucks.
Opera is a piece of garbage, and definitely 3-4 times slower than Chrome.
Chrome is quick but new IE8 is equally fast as chrome and has a bunch of stuff like accelerators/webslices etc which make it far more attractive than chrome [they too have a seperate sandbox for each of the tabs] — go and throw it into the mix
You really can’t beat a bit of Google software. They put their everything into everything. Google software and web apps don’t ever seem to disappoint.
its all a little behind safari 4.0 it feels like. talking of speed – why are webkit.org’s JS tests failing.. or they are just taking a lot of time. Safari 4 beta seriously is fast and to me, Chrome is just kinda matching.. not fast at all places.
Also, when login page redirects are there – the page load fails .. example: statcounter login that I have seen so far.. or facebook too. Check n see
Great, yet another browser that we dev’s get to test against, fantastic.
Quit your whining. If you code to Web Standards, it’s a piece of cake.
That’s the whole point of web standards…. Web Standards allow for there to be hundreds (or even thousands) of different user agents that render pages identically according to the specifications set forth by the W3C.
Jason, seriously. I’ve never seen a complicated page coded to W3C standards that hits EVERY browser properly, come on. Managing browsers is one of the biggest time suckers out there.
This is more work for developers who will have to support FF, IE6 and 7 (which render differently and my pure css sites are working better on IE6 go figure!), Opera, Safari and Chrome now… oh yeah and netscape, which some folks still use.
Totally agree, lets list them:
IE6
IE7
FF2
FF3
Safari3
Safari4
Opera
and now Chrome.
If it catches on you can add another body to your frontend developers and yet another body to QA as well. Standards be damned, sounds great but never, ever works out that way.
IMHO the last thing that businesses need is yet another browser to support and cost yet more money to develop.
Yes, it seems just as fast as Opera. Much faster than Firefox but you have to remember that Chrome doesn’t have all those Firefox Add-ons / extensions slowing it down either.
I use FF3 with only one extension and Chrome is still faster than FF3 though.
No, it’s 3-4 times faster than Opera. Run a benchmark.
Opera is for retards.
It is fast but Firefox has all those plugins which are super useful. So really its success will depend on what cool features developers add to it. It will be interesting to see what type of market share it gets because it is Google.
Is Google becoming too big?
For developers, it probably won’t be the browser of choice… But 95% of web users do not care (or even know) about Firefox add-ons. I really don’t think that a lack of extensibility will deter users from using it. Maybe by obscurity by not being a default when you purchase a computer.
Perhaps we may see the day when computer makers sell computers that only have a custom OS to run Google Chrome…. I’d be willing to bet Google is already working on such an OS!
69% of statistics are made up on the spot.
there is a good way to make your firefox and IE faster then chrome….bliv me!!!
A few “bugs” I found
I use UltraMon for multiple monitors. I can’t switch the browser between windows. There is always a button to extend or switch the window to the other browser and it’s not there.
I went to facebook and went to “friends” page. When I tried to alternate between “Status Updates” and “Recently Updated” there was an error. Maybe it’s something on my end.
Quite a bit is broken in Facebook with Google’s browser (clicking a video doesn’t automatically play it inline, filtering by groups on the friends page or starting a new list doesn’t work at all… ). I would recommend Google’s browser engineers start there to weed out bugs. I guess Google’s employees only use Orkut.
It seems a little jerky when scrolling. And it’s taking a bit of time to get used to the tabs right at the top. Apart from that, it rocks.
I wonder if it will get more downloads in the first 24 hours than Firefox 3 did?
I doubt it. Lots of people are current Firefox users. Starting from scratch will be harder.
Google is really taking over the world…
Phone (Android)
Blog (Blogger)
Mail (Gmail)
Chat (Talk)
Analytics
Book
Calendar
Checkout
Docs
Health
Images
Maps
News
RSS (Reader)
Search
Video (YouTube)
Knol (Wikipedia)
and once they buy facebook, they’ll truly own ALL our Internet souls:
Facebook Search –> Google Search
Facebook Mobile –> Google Android App
Facebook Inbox –> Gmail
Facebook Newsfeed –> iGoogle
Google is MUCH scarier than Microsoft. Microsoft just owns the physical OS hardware, some aging software, and some hardware. Google KNOWS EVERYTHING… they give me directions, they give me me every website I ever go… mix the social aspect of over 100M users worldwide, and people will be laughing at Flickr and how limited it is once Google owns every single facebook photo and links it to search.
I won’t be tagging my friends only, I’ll be tagging what bar we were at, how we got there (etc.)
But a Google/facebook merge could also be catastrophic if done wrong (like most large corporation mergers happen) – but is it me, or do the Google/facebook cultures almost perfectly match each other?
The Internet is going to be a very interesting place in 10 years (especially when Microsoft is almost out of the picture).
The Internet is the OS.
I think your tinfoil hat is on a little tight. First off, Google won’t buy Facebook, why would they? For advertising? They have stated time and again that social network advertising is horrible and Facebook’s ads are performing ridiculously bad. Unless Facebook comes up with a business model and a good one at that, they will implode under their own weight.
Chrome is awesome.
This isn’t another Knol or Lively – products that were initially exciting because of their creator, but aren’t ready for everyday use.
In my limited testing I haven’t had any problems with Chrome. Bookmarks and settings imported easily and in general the browser seems a bit snappier than Firefox, especially when using Google Docs. Between speed and application shortcuts that allow users to directly load online apps, Chrome might be the tool that finally gets people to transition to online document services.
Every webpage I’ve tested so far has rendered perfectly. If you ever run into the problem of opening too many tabs, not only do you not have to worry about all of your windows crashing, but you can drag tabs out of the browser to create new windows.
My only complaint so far is that we don’t have access to firefox add-ons.
The text search tool is the best I’ve ever used (I know this isn’t an often highlighted feature, but I use it a lot lol). Instead of finding search terms one by one, it highlights every mention of the term on the page (similar to how Google highlights words on cached pages in its search engine).
It’s also nice how the status bar fades away to give you more browser real estate when it’s not in use.
I’d like to see some add-ons, but overall I’m very impressed by Chrome. It might become my primary browser.
This is exactly another Knol or lively!
I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for 15 minutes and so far it has been a great experience! Love the interface! It’ll be my default internet browser for sure. I’m just missing my Google Toolbar Favorites! Hope it’ll be available soon!
The browser is a good concept, but a little shaky. Some of the fonts rendered are not clear, making it unusable.
The rest of the sites which load fine look good. The browser seems fast, and it a sure firefox killer.
http://www.tech...tya/2008-09-02/
Google wants to control everything that happens on the Web (and the Internet, the pipes). It’s definitely becoming the new Microsoft.
Only that something more dangerous it at stake:
Your Privacy.
Google = All-we-can-know (about you)
Year 2020 – Google offers human RFID tags, called “Google TotalControl”. Try Google TotalControl – you wont regret it. You get location based advertisments and special offers, while Google tracks your daily paths. Google InHouseMotionControl data is also joined with GoogleTotalControl rfid, bio-analysis and location data: you’ll get your pizza delivered, before you know that you wanted a pizza.
Seriously Mr Arrington – you complained about mr flip flop obama and here you suggest (completely unfiltered) throwing even more data at google. While Crome might in fact be a great peace of software, it’s really craptastic journalism not mentioning the growing marketshare and -everywhere-data-collection-
What about the release of Chrome as an open source project?
If you disclose source code, if you sign and respect fair and clear agreements with the end user, I could give you a copy of my house keys.
You know there is this new type of tinfoil that is supposed to work WAY better to make hats with, you may want to look into it. I didn’t even need Google Analytics to guess that you would be interested
And talk about flip flop, how about deciding on a topic instead of abitrarilly throwing in an Obama reference in a comment about Google. Unless the McCain camp is paying you well enough…
I’ll wait until the first wave of hacking/cracking is over before even thinking about downloading and installing this on my PC. My computer is far too important for me to use it as a Guniea pig and one thing you can be certain of is that hackers everywhere are already looking for exploits.
You must be pretty important. We all sure appreciate you stopping by to let us know just how important you are.
I’ve tried Chrome on Facebook and I got a lot of problems with javascript….
Am I alone?
same here, in the friends section you cant click on some buttons…
I’ve reported it as a bug.
I have been having a lot of facebook errors with Chrome as well. most of the links wont work. like ‘removing a poke’; ‘adding another mobile number’, ‘browsing through gifts’ etc.
Most of the java links don’t work in Facebook. That’s the only thing stopping my from going 100% with Chrome so far
I find some humour that it doesn’t run Microsoft’s ‘Silverlight’ – lol
Poor MS, always getting left out in the cold…
it does run silverlight
doesn’t support silverlight2.0 (1 is totally lame, useless)
it doesnt, just tested with silverlight. come on, what is new in this, other than up-side-down tabs?
Its the same webkit used by safari!
If they wanted a faster js engine, why dont they collaborate better and dedicate their v8 engine to Mozilla community that they are supporting? why do we need another browser instead?
I just thought things were going well with Google & Mozilla… Thieves!
I wonder how many years chrome will be in beta… haha
Is it just me, or does it not seem to be integrated at all with Google Bookmarks?
It’s not inherently linked with Google Bookmarks at this point. But I just wrote a post explaining how you can hook it up Chrome Google Bookmarks
.
Gah, that should have been “hook it Chrome WITH.” Too excited today
- Adam, who is a Googler but not on the Chrome team
Wow I kept hearing about it through blogs but no one had written a review or mentioned it was downloadable at the moment. I’m definitely going to check it out! Thanks for all the info!
Yep, it’s unbelievably amazing, but i’m still missing those FTP & TwitterFox plugin on Firefox…..
but hey, player’s a player and it’s time to move on, right!
OK, nice browser, now I am suppose to sit back and wait till all the plug ins I use on FF become available to Chrome???
Chrome, even if better, is still primarily a browser designed to serve you more targeted ads.
Let Google know even more about me?
NO WAY, DUDE !
Looks great, homepage is a winner, but the main issue with me is customization. I like to be able to set my browser to open all results in new browser but this is not available, so instead I have to take the extra step of hitting alt+enter, ughh. Granted firefox removed this feature from its latest browser update so pretty much even there and IE7 doesn’t have the feature unless you download IE7pro. It is fast, but light always makes things faster and this is a super-light browser. I don’t know yet I’m not one for a bunch of plugins (firefox claim to fame) so this might work for me but I’m sure the plugins and are coming in droves.
Does this make google firefox’s frienemy? Only time will tell.
I love it so far. One gripe though, I have not been able to get “middle mouse click” scrolling to work. Anyone else had any luck with this?
omg
so google actually bought the entire techrunch team. getting a ‘buy’ recommendation after 10 minutes of playing with a product is something even Enron wasn’t able to pull it off.
I have to agree here. The article does seem pretty googly-eyed. Only three sentences with a negative tone (one of which was only griping about it not being available to everyone). And no mention of potential ad targeting? Really?
Techcrunch loves your product if it’s anti-Microsoft.
anyone knows how to remove “underline links”?
Amazingly fast. In my experience I have not seen another browser fetch and render pages this fast – especially the ajax pages.
i am nothing without my firefox addons. but chrome seems to be very fast and smooth. i noticed chrome help site is not loading fine in chrome itself.
Hell no.
ENOUGH OF GOOGLE ALREADY !!! STOP THE DARK SIDE !!!
Not impressed, logged into facebook and loaded up the owned app and a ton of ajax bits and bobs fail to work. Couple of other sites too. Perhaps thats why its fast, LOL. It’s not going to work if you can’t rely on it to support existing sites. Now if I use it I will not know if the site is broken or Chrome is.
Needs some polish this Chrome, its a little rusty around the edges.
Yes, I had problem on Facebook as well. The facebook album application does not seem to work correctly.
Chrome is cool, but for web developers, it is yet another browser to test for.
I agree … its an amazing peace of software. Fast, elegant design and nice features like the homepage and the incognito mode.
Quiet interesting that Chrome asks about the default search at first start. Seems like Google is well aware that they might get the problems MS got once …
I think amazing for mobile devices. Clean and simple.
Not amazing for desktop everyday use compared to FF – at least in the way I use it with the add-ons that I have come to rely on.
Chrome does well in Javascript speed tests:
http://www.degu...;day=2008-09-02
Hmmm, copied and pasted URL from Chrome for the Javascript speed test but Windows buffer kept the wrong URL. Here’s the correct one:
http://www.degu...d-test-results/
Like every other producer of big AJAX apps we freak at the prospect of a browser going out without the opportunity to test it first. The prospect of our 300K (uncompressed) of with lots of dynamic updates of HTML running out of the box on a new browser did keep me up last night.
So far Chrome works near-flawlessly with our applications. Now that is impressive.
Here is some interesting reading on the new JS engine
http://ajaxian....vascript-engine
I have not found a significant speed up the slowest parts of our application but then our bottle neck is speed of DOM updates in Javascript rather than the JS engine.
lol they dont use webkit’s JS engine they own V8 google’s own
I have just “Chromed” Facebook and it seemed ok! I’m “Chroming” the web!
Looks like WebKit’s marketshare is going to be bigger than anyone anticpated. Remember that Google also settled on WebKit for Android. And the iPhone uses it in Safari as well…
Ok, how do I block Ads?
Seriously, the hold-mousewheel-down-and-drag doesn’t work. Fix it Google.
Also, had to add this comment in FF, Chrome wouldn’t let me.
seems no faster than firefox 3. looks like they just opened up the number of simultaneous connections per server?
Yeah… I’m sure that’s all they did…
even funnier now is that it wont load techcrunch, all i get are 503 errors and cryptic errors with your varnish accelerator. When i use FF it works everytime. Something under the hood not right?
It’s happening to me on all browsers. I think the traffic on TC today must be through the roof.
IE7 introduced Search Engine Detection before Chrome. The “minimalist design”, (no menu, aero integration in vista) is also inspired from IE7 and, to some extent, Opera. The only difference is that here no body is screamming “Where is the menu, it sucks!”.
However, for speed and stability, Google did a good job by using one process per tab. IE8 (still beta) do the same. It’s a great choice because if one tab causes a crash, it will close alone. It’s the only point where I find that Chrome bring something new.
Try using your scroll wheel on your mouse to move up and down a PDF document inside Chrome. Ugh.
The Gmail Chat *ding* that occurs when someone sends you an IM isn’t working in Chrome. Ugh.
A few key pages that I visit frequently have sections of them which don’t display. There’s an icon that says, “no plugin available to display this content.” Ugh.
I have to click 100% more (twice) to get to my iGoogle homepage. Attenuated ugh.
Am trying out Chrome and I see it has helped itself to all my saved logins/passwords from Firefox. Guessing this is a by-product of some shared Firefox code platform?
Also the “Launch App From Desktop” bit reminds me of Mozilla Prism. Nothing revolutionary there but maybe another example of shared Mozilla code I guess.
I dunno, I think I’m officially scared of Google now.
The installer doesn’t seem to support proxies, making this a bust for us in the corporate world who want to do testing. C’mon, Google, give us a regular installer.
Open source browser launches on a Closed source platform(Windows), what an irony!
I have tried 10 webpages from google news to msnbc.com to richarddawkins.net to mlb.com just to be random – opera was faster on every page except for on mlb this one java applet – no way am i ditching opera (and no new times roman like ff ha!)
“Inspect Element” is good but not as powerful as firebug
Please Fire Don right now!
i) The speed dial is an Opera copy.
ii) it installs under Application Data (research by Camus Sonico) think about security?
iii) “…it’s easily one of the best.”: Wow, in just a few hours you compared it with Opera, Firefox (think addons), Safari, Flock… and yesterday on:
http://www.tech...ile-app-stores/
you didn’t have a clue about what an SDK is…
And check you process I have three running
make that 4
I just closed this shit browser and I have two processes totaling 35M sitting in memory. Wtf?
If you want to track how many of your users are already using Chrome, we’ve already added support for it into Clicky Web Analytics: http://getclick...owser-detection
Looks like quite a few people using it already. We’re getting about 1 new visitor per minute on Chrome.