Google Chrome Is Here! How’s It Working?!

Google Chrome, the much anticipated web browser, is here in Beta. I’m not an uber-tech-geek, and I’ve obviously only had so much time with it, but here are some initial impressions.

Purely based on layout, I love it. Everything is very simple, and in my effort to simulate a few days worth of online activities in the last few hours, the interface has turned out to be rather handy. It has a tab feature similar to my IE, but the little cartoon you can find from the download page implies it is a different system of tab. I don’t know if that’s the case, or not, but I do know that the tabs are very functional, and I found myself swapping them around in interesting ways.

Chrome features a bookmark bar, which allows you to drag any page onto the bar for future quick access. You can drag from this bar up to the tabs, to open the site in a new tab, or just click on it to open in the tab you are currently on.

You can also drag tabs off the tab bar and instantly open a new browser window, and when you want, you can slap that window back into a tab. This, as you may imagine, proved convenient on several occasions.

The “all in one box” wherein you would clearly expect to type the web address you want to go to, has search and suggestion capability built into one box. As you type, a list of suggested searches, pages, and related pages from your history begin appearing beneath the box. Obviously, this gets more and more interesting as you use the browser, but the suggested sites and searches are often well worth getting without having to try to get them.

The main bar of the browser has some other interesting features as well, like an easy to get to set of controls for the page you are on, which includes – cut, copy, change text size (really cool), and a list of other standards. One new thing that Google likes to mention is the Create Application Shortcut option, from which you can create a shortcut to any web application (like your mail, for example) on your desktop, the start menu, or the quick launch bar. Also in this set of Page Controls is an amazing page search to, obviously, search the webpage you are currently viewing. It jumps around the page as quickly as you type, snapping around to most likely options as you continue to fill in your search.

How does it perform… so far?

It seems to run a bit slower, and then a lot faster. I don’t remotely pretend to know what’s going on behind the scenes of web browsers, but I can tell you what my experience seems like. As I surfed, and surfed, and surfed, anywhere I went took a bit longer to load. In some cases, quite a bit longer. But, once at whatever site, moving around in that site was a lot faster. In a lot of cases, almost too fast.

As an example, take Amazon.com, when I went to Amazon, loading the front page seemed to take a very long time compared to IE. But, once there, when I clicked to go to something, or searched the site, the page transitions from then on were extremely fast. I said, “almost too fast,” and Amazon was example of that. A few others were Netflix, IMDb.com, Barnes & Noble, RottenTomatoes, and BestBuy. Here’s the problem, and was only a problem for the first few minutes, before I was at all used to Chrome. Often, the page you are trying to go to looks very similar to the one you’re on, and you’re used to the way IE goes from one to the other. In Chrome, there were several times that I would click some link to go to some other page, product, or whatever, and I would suddenly be there, but without much discernible happening. Of course, something happened, but not something that triggered whatever I’ve been conditioned to up to this point in my browsing career.

Downloads seem to run about the same, but I don’t download files that much. Chrome has a, I guess, handy Download keeper-tracker-ofer, and they seem very proud of it. Videos downloaded pretty quickly, as well as several video and picture heavy webpages.

Now, one more thing to mention – Chrome would prefer you not have a homepage, because it has this really cool feature that replaces the whole idea of homepages. It is, I suppose, based generally on the currently popular trend of “clouds,” and instead of a homepage, Chrome pops you onto a Most Visited page when you open it (of course, you can set a homepage). A little grid of boxes shows previews of the pages you’ve been to most often, so that you can just click from there… yep, that’s where I always go… thanks Chrome. You also get a little box listing your most recent bookmark additions, and the option to see your full history.

That’s about I’ll I’ve got for now.

Let me know how you’re doing with it.

Are You Screening?