Posted by Patrick Neeman | September 12, 2008
Google Chrome: The Good, The Bad, The Bookmarked
I’ve been using Google Chrome the past few days, and here’s a few thoughts:
The good
- It’s snappy. I’m not going to run any speed tests, but it seems to be at least as fast as the new Firefox, and much faster than Internet Explorer.
- It doesn’t try to be too much, because it knows it’s a browser. There’s a back button, forward button, reload button, settings button and a document button which is basically the old tools menu from Word — throw everything in there. A lot of those other menu items (assumed stuff, like print) is hidden, which is good.
- The interface is slick, but I disagree that it’s going to be the operating system. It has aways to go until it replaces Microsoft Word.
- Tabs are application independent, meaning one tab cannot freeze another tab.
The bad
- It’s standards compliant, so it isn’t. It uses the WebKit rendering engine, which is the most standards compliant engine, but least adopted. So, Chrome has some funkiness to it that should cause developers to look at the pages.
- The suggest integration is slick (are URLs going to go away?), however it just drives traffic back to Google’s search engine, which someone is going to point out that it increases Google’s monopolistic approach. Another case of giving away the razors to sell the razor blades.
- Remember, it’s Google. Read that Google terms of use agreement carefully, because it looks like they are bringing advertisements to a browser to you, Opera-style.
- It feels like a Beta. Can’t explain it, just feels like it needs some polish.
- How do I add on stuff? How do I change the theme? Is Google the new Microsoft?
The bookmarked
- Bookmark management is still unwieldly. Maybe the Google Suggest should search through the bookmarks first, and have a separate suggest section? There has to be a better way of doing this.
- The Options under the Settings menu is much simplified (thank you!), but may be too simple for some corporate environments.
- Does anyone worry about Google reporting back browser habits to their servers?
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