James Burgess

Okay, so for the past few days I’ve been taking a really good look at Google Chrome - and I must say, I’m impressed.  Of course, we can’t take this to be the final state of affairs insofar as the features and stability goes, but I’m going to go ahead and give my thoughts anyway.

First off, I’m going to get everyone’s primary “feature” out of the way: Chrome’s rendering speed, especially for JavaScript, is incredibly fast.  This makes using many of the ‘Web 2.0′ applications far simpler and easier - with response times resembling client-side applications more and more.  With that all said, I’m not going to dwell on this aspect, as it seems to be the only ‘feature’ 90% of the blogosphere have noticed about Chrome.

There have been a lot of reports of Chrome crashing, even despite the not-so-unique (see IE8) one-process-per-tab feature.  However, I’ve not had so much as a single tab crash, let alone the entire browser - so I fail to see what all the fuss is about.  Software will always crash (well, unless you’re running the space shuttle’s code - 1 reported error in 500,000 lines of code is pretty impressive), but I can’t see anything out of the ordinary with Chrome.

Chrome’s ‘minimalistic’ interface is a joy to use, and it becomes quite easy to forget it’s even there - it’s far more efficient than the ’slimmed-down’ version of the Firefox toolbars I run on a day-to-day basis.  The whole ‘tabs on top’ thing, makes far more sense - and I simply wonder why no-one thought of this naturally-mapped option a little earlier.

Of course, there are a number of shortcomings, most notably (and maybe I’m just blind) is the lack of a middle-click scroll option.  Maybe this isn’t a big issue for some, but the click-scroll option is one of my ‘web browsing staples’.  I also sorely missed some features I’m used to, such ad-blocking - but I’m sure these features will come with time (or, at least, I hope they will).

All-in-all, though, I must say that Chrome is impressive, and I hope that the small issues will be ironed out sooner rather than later, as I can’t wait to turn it into my default browser.