Google Chrome – First impression.

Benny September 4, 2008 3 comments

A whole new browser. (?) 🙂 Can’t agree to that fully, since it is based on Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox components.
I personally like the products from Google, and I believe Chrome would also make some difference in the Browser market, though it is available only in XP and Vista. A Linux version should make this difference easily. Few good things are  a Quicker installation, quick loading of pages (do they show them from their cache?), and recently visited pages shown as thumbnails.

You get a bigger screen for websites, unlike the other browsers there is no bottom information bar, the page loading information just comes as an Ajax(?) window, and vanishes after the page gets loads.

Our website menu is not positioned properly; Our CSS team is working on it to fix that soon. I used Chrome for writing this blog, and found it is working very fine. I hope WordPress team do not have to work hard for these browsers. I noticed an issue commented in WordPress editor issue – The format had gone completely, when I saved and opened this blog entry. This has to be fixed in the WYSIWYG plugin in WordPress.

I am keen to check some of the DHTML sites, probably the scripts from Dynamicdrive.com, as their scripts are widely used for menus and browser side dynamics.

There is no favicon appearing in the address and title tab, no Google chrome Logo and title anywhere. The location of the Tab looks nice, most of the browsers do use this project for Product title. This is a smart move.
No Google toolbar for Chrome yet, hope it is under development, they should launch it any time now. Chrome does import your favourites etc from IE quickly.

Developers and designers have to spend more time for this browser too, as I do not think Chrome is going to be just another Browser, since it has better focus on web applications. Google office documents should perform well with Chrome, But I didn’t notice big difference when I opened Spreadsheets in Chrome. I expected the suggest for work well inside the columns, seems like such features are yet to come.
Overall the Browser is impressive, and I hope it will affect the market Share of IE and Firefox to an extent, especially the later one.