Minor revisions 5/9/2008
First glances are promising: the integrated search and address bar works well as do the visual representation of most common visited sites, and bookmarks as thumbnails.
When Chrome encounters a poorly written website (or one that it is unable to cope with) then it is the tab that crashes and not the browser, though in testing I have not been able to cause a crash (a good sign in itself). Chrome’s privacy mode, called "incognito" will be of benefit to anyone wishing to browse on a shared computer: it ensures that no history or cookies are kept locally. (Internet Explorer 8 also has this feature called "inPrivate Browsing".)
Chrome’s interface is quite stark but its ability to go full screen and minimal would suggest that its intended use is as a means to access web based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail.
In a very rough test, Chrome was significantly faster than both Internet Explorer 7 and an "un-tuned" installation of Firefox.
Chrome is Open Source, which will surely mean that, as with Firefox, a wide range of plug-ins get developed.
Download and installation were very quick and easy, with bookmarks and tabs picked up from Firefox. As yet there are no Mac or Linux versions, but these will surely come.
Privacy considerations
For the more paranoid, the combined search and address bar suggests that every address we type will be recorded by Google, thereby enabling Google to collect even more data on which sites users visit, and thus Google better to target advertising at individual users. The privacy options give you some control over the "pass-back" of usage information to Google ; and the fact that Chrome is Open Source should allow the more technically capable to confirm that these privacy options work.
Overall, if you interested in a lightweight web browser, Chrome is well worth a look; and it is bound to get better. I will be comparing Chrome with Firefox over the next few months. For the moment I am not planning to take Firefox, with its invaluable range of plug-ins, off my PCs.
You can download chrome at google chrome download. Meanwhile there are lots of YouTube demos sprouting up. Personally I quite liked the comic strip that Google uses to describe the engineering thinking behind Chrome. This is at Read about the Technology
Dick Moore is Director of Technology at Ufi learndirect
For those of you who are quick of the mark and have downloaded an early version to look at, you should ensure that you upgrade: two high impact (though low probability) security issues have been identified and resolved in two new releases last week. This is a beta release and should be treated as such.
Dick
Posted by: Dick Moore | 10/09/2008 at 10:43