Google chrome: a first impressions review.
Posted by: atom, 2008 09.03
I like it a lot.
Keeping it non-technical, because someone else will rant about that stuff in more detail than I am willing to or can.
Stuff I am liking:
- Very fast
- It is very roomy feeling, not much “chrome” as it were.
- I don’t have to relearn shortcuts, they are almost all FFish
- I can open JavaScript bookmarklets in new tabs (this was not the case for FF as of version 3)
- Searching is awesome, with a bit of setup, its very few keystrokes, like: “w jelly” to search wikipedia for jelly
- View source pops up in a tab
- The animations are cute and informative without being annoying
- the launch page is handy (although Opera has had this for some time)
- Built in “appability” (make one tab appear as an application window, for something like google docs)
- Built in tab restore (I constantly close a tab and then realize I want it back)
- Built in and fairly complete dom inspector, console, and JS debugger
- The process manager is awesome. Even when stuff gets out of hand, you can assumably fix it without losing your whole session
- The find dialogue is great, however it will take a moment or two to adjust to top-right vs bottom-left
Lets get critical*:
- The inspector, while nice, doesn’t allow me to change stuff on the fly like firebug does
- There appear to be some JS animation / transparent png issues
- I can’t do much in the way of scrolling
- I don’t think the form elements displayed are as attractive as Firefox’s (on Vista)
- As far as I have seen, there does not appear to be a way for me to view and interact with ajax requests
At least for now, it will be my default browser, however I will still be using Firefox for development purposes. I want chrome to succeed, and to do this it will need to be embraced by and passionately work with the open source crowd. So far they appear to be off to a cracking good start. I will follow up with more later when I have used it extensively.
* please note that I am not an experienced webkit-based browser user.








September 3rd, 2008 at 12:20 am
I’ve more-or-less come to the same conclusion: Chrome for standard browsing, FF for development. That’s what I’m going to try for, anyway. Chrome’s lack of addons may push be back to FF in the short-term, but I’m coming up with alternatives to the ones that I’m most used to.
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:53 am
I think I’m in love already.
No major hitches so far. The learning curve is practically nonexistent. It even has spellcheck.
September 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
I had a good time with Chrome. It was quick and clean. I expect this app to move to the top handful of applications running on a regular basis pretty quickly.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:17 am
If you like Chrome’s stripped down Web Inspector, you will love the original, full featured version in the WebKit nightlies. (Including double clicking to edit CSS/DOM.) Cheers!
September 4th, 2008 at 1:41 am
@Timothy
What I love is Firebug. Let me know when you have it topped.