Paradox Designs

Google chrome was released today, and i have been using it for a while now. It is different than most other browsers, but almost all the changes are good. It is speedy, clean, well built, and doesn’t crash. They seem to be missing a few things, but for beta software, its incredibly complete.

First run

The first time you boot up chrome, you notice one thing. Its very fast. And i mean VERY fast. Loading pages is instant, rarely taking longer than 2 seconds. Javascript applications (eg Facebook, Gmail, Google Reader) are incredibly fast, faster than some desktop apps. Its interface is quite clean, and has the Google look.

Other Browsers

Google claims Chrome can get bookmark data from other browsers (a must in todays browsers), but in my experience, it only imported from IE. There was no option to import bookmarks and data from Opera, and Google will need to remedy this before this browser is launched.

Omnibar and start page

The Omnibar is an amazing resource. I had results for sites i wanted to visit instantly, and was able to get to them without having to type in a full address. The search boxes it adds dynamically are very well done, I was able to find stuff on amazon far easier than any other interface i have ever used.

The start page isn’t really that useful for me, as i would like to customize it more, but i suspect with use it will become better and better, as it learns from what you do.

Gears

One of the unique features of chrome is the built in google gears. If a site is gears enabled, you will get all the features you would in any other version, but you dont have to worry about extensions or anything like that. It just works. You can also create application shortcuts which let you use web apps in their own window, as if they were their own program, but you dont have to download them.

Rendering

The rendering engine in Chrome is WebKit[1. That is, the same rendering engine that powers Safari. Although it seems to work better in chrome. Webkit.org], so it supports all the CSS3 properties that webkit does. I was hoping google would add more types of support, but they havn’t yet.

Since the rendering engine is Webkit, Chrome supports box-resize, as well as min-width, min-height, max-width, and max-height, so you web developers can build your site with those in mind.

There is a built in spell check, similar to that of Firefox, and it works quite well.

Special Windows

Gears has a number of Special windows, that is, windows that provide useful info that are populated by the browser. These windows are things such as history, the DOM inspector, bookmarks, start page, etc.

The history page is a very nice view, allowing you to search, and view screenshots of the page as you saw it. This is very useful when you remember what a page looked like, but not its full name. Also, you can search the contents of pages in the history.

The built in DOM inspector is very similar to that in the new Safari, so it works and is as powerful as Firebug or Dragonfly.

Finally, there is an enhanced memory viewing page, called about:memory that shows you very detailed descriptions about the browsers memory use. This goes hand in hand with its one process per tab interface, and allows you to see who is eating all your ram.

All in all, its is a very, very, very good browser for a beta release, and i do not think anything will be able to replace it for me.

http://google.com/chrome