Opera, Safari, iExplorer, Firefox, and now Chrome. Like we didn't have enough mainstream browsers as it was. Google's attempt to grab a slice of yet another market has now been realised, but is their new Chrome offereing enough to get people to switch?
I've finally had time to put Chrome through its paces on some of the sites I've created & maintained, which are all ajax-based, css standardised, and javascript heavy. As a devout Opera 10 user, it's next to impossible to get me to switch browsers, but will Chrome have enough shine to move me?
To summarise:
Pros
- Compiled Javascript - all the sites performed much faster
- Site sandboxing - runaway scripts can be killed without having to crash the browser
- Plugins - I'm against plug-ins in general (bar small amounts of flash and firebug), but allowing them to run in their own process space sounds like a good thing
- UI look & feel - plus big points for minimalistic approach
- Open source
- Built-in DOM inspector
Cons
- "Most Visited" sites home page - Browse histories don't do it for me. I need a programmable & static set of icons (Opera!)
- No mouse gestures - again, maybe it's because Opera's spoiled me, but without mouse gestures, old-school 'point and click' is plain slow
- "Beta" - fair enough it's just been released, but is there anything that ever makes it past beta from google (gmail anyone)? Perhaps they should just register the "beta" thing as a trademark and be done with it
- No Synrchonisation - This was something that got released with the new build of Opera a few months ago. It lets you log into your browser, and have it sync your bookmarks et al regardless of where you are or which computer you're on.
Overall
Very nice attempt, if I was coming from IE or Safari, or possibly even firefox chances are I'd convert (though if I was a firefox fanboy, I'd stick with FF out of principal). Chrome beats all contenders when it comes to observable performance, plus the internal wiring's more advanced. However, when it comes to useability, it just doesn't size up to Opera.
Since Chrome's open-source, I'm sure it's just a matter of time until the community creates enough plug-ins to mimic the UI smarts built in to Opera; but until then, I'm willing to sacrifice a couple of seconds of site performance & load time, to the incredible amount of time saved with navigation.
Nice going Google, but I'll wait for the RC!
posted @ Wednesday, September 03, 2008 12:26 PM