I’m guilty: I love the word “Beta”.
I wish cars, food and relationships would come in Beta releases. Try it. For free. Just let us know how it went.
When I heard Google was coming out with a browser, I tell you, I couldn’t contain myself. I IM’d everyone in the office, and Twittered, FriendFeeded, Ping.fm’d, and while reading the transcript of the launch conference, salivating with primal anxiousness, I refreshed Google’s download page several, several, several times.
And then the download link appeared.
Fast forward to 30 days later and witness something that happens rarely. I’m still using it.
I try several web applications, specially those with the “by invitation only” ones, and to be honest, 99% of the time they are not being used by me a week later.
To me, Google Chrome is good. It might not be for everyone, but if you consider yourself mildly techie, I think you’ll fit the demo.
Let me tell you the good things.
You probably heard about it everywhere, but let me say it again (no SEO for me): This browser loads fast, surfs fast, responds fast; it feels like it was a piece of software written by engineers with severe ADD. According to Google, the Chrome team rewrote the Javascript engine from scratch, and called it V8 or something like that (I wonder what were they drinking). This engine is not only very fast, it caches Javascript code, which, as you might guess, is a huge chunk of today’s web 2.0 apps. So if you use a lot of the Google tools (like Gmail, Docs or Reader) or any AJAX/JS heavy site, Chrome will make them fly.
Another thing I like is that its UI is completely unobtrusive. It has the normal bookmarks bar, but I find myself using it less and less. Chrome has an intelligent URL bar that’s more like a wizard. It keeps second guessing you. So if you visit Feedburner a lot and you type “f” on the URL bar, it’ll suggest http://feedburner.com/whateveryouridis. It also opens a dashboard with a graphic representation of the websites you visit the most every time you open a new tab.
Speaking about tabs, and this is something Firefox really could use, each one of them has its own memory space. What does that mean? If one of the websites you were visiting didn’t play nice with AJAX or Flash and freezes, that tab freezes, but not the browser. I even monitor tabs that are using too much memory and if they’re bogging down my machine, I kill them (see image below).
If you work a lot offline (like I do in the Subway train), Chrome has built-in Google Gears, which allows you, among other things, to work with Google Documents or read your Google Reader items without an internet connection. As a matter of fact, the majority of the post was written in a Google Doc text document on the R train.
What else? Oh yeah, there’s a pr0n tab, that lets you visit sites without leaving any traces that you did. But I never use that one. Seriously.
Now to the things I don’t like.
Flash. Now this is something that maybe Chrome has no fault of, because I’ve also found that Flash in Firefox has a severe memory leak. But a lot of times I tried watching YouTube videos or left Google Analytics open for a long time (probably unknown to you, but Analytics renders the graphs using Flash), and although Chrome doesn’t crash, it bogs down the whole machine’s CPU. So in case you see your CPU usage way high, look for a Chrome (or Firefox) tab with a Flash app open. The only browser I see working properly with Flash is IE.
The other thing I miss are plugins, specially Firebug. Chrome doesn’t support plugins at all, and I’m not sure it ever will.
The final word? I haven’t been using Firefox in the last 30 days, with the exception of when I need to use Firebug. I feel bad for Firefox because I really like it and always support Opensource. But as we move more and more into a cloud application world, the browser is poised to become the O/S, and Chrome excels in that area.
Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts and/or experiences.
Link: Read this month’s Wired Mag’s article about Chrome
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