Does Google Chrome shine?
Posted by Jon Peddie on September 15th 2008 | Discuss
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So I did it, not on day one but by day three I downloaded Chrome and tried it. I still use it occasionally to see if there are any changes or upgrades, but basically it’s not impressive. It’s a little faster, hardly noticeable, than Firefox, and anything is faster than IE7, but who cares because no power user uses it anyway.
The choice of name is amusing. “Chrome” was the ill-fated name Microsoft gave to a new software initiative in 1998, which was code-named GDI2. It was supposed to offer 3D acceleration in the UI for web-based multimedia, and, are you ready for this? “designed to leverage high-performance PC hardware to enable Web content to load faster and look better.” That’s how Eric Angstrom, Microsoft’s GM for Internet Multimedia at the time put it. He was also in charge of the ChromeEffects project. He left MS to be CEO of Wildseed, which got bought by AOL in 2005 and, as you know, MS is trying to buy AOL. Small world eh?
Editorials and blogs on the web have suggested Google’s Chrome is a Trojan horse designed to lure unsuspecting users into Google’s cloud computing paradigm. The Register for example suggested “it significantly changes the balance of power between those trying to build modern client platforms.”
That seems pretty farfetched, as if someone could be tricked into using Google’s word processor. Speaking of which, it is convenient if you’re on an alien machine and it doesn’t have an office suite, to be able to get access to one. However, for my money (which is a small donation) the Open Office suite is the best thing to hit the PC since SunOffice—oh wait, it’s the same thing, it’s just free now. Microsoft, trying to offset Open Office is offering a 60 day trial. Corel, which also has an office suite, isn’t playing the free game yet. The point is that Chrome has about as much to do with luring people into Google’s free office suite as Chrom- Effects had in luring people into Microsoft’s UI.
It ain’t so shiny
But what about Chrome? Well, quite frankly it’s not that great. In FireFox, if you use Yahoo Mail, the spell checker runs in the background (like Open Office’s word processor Writer, and Microsoft’s Word—It’s been so long since I tried Corel’s I can’t remember, but it probably works like that too.) In Chrome, you have to invoke it and then go back and fix the misspelled words—so that’s a time loser, not a time saver. That’s the same way IE works with Yahoo mail.
No Google bar
I was unable to load the Google search bar. When I tried, it told me to update Firefox—I’m sure someone at Google will figure that out and fix it. There isn’t, in this version, any way to load toolbars that I could figure out. Aside from that silliness, the default search engine is Google, as you would expect. And, you can choose from a list of nine other search engines.
Omnibar
However, you can also do searches in the URL window. To find an article in the browser history, just type in the name and it shows every page visited that contained that name. The Omnibar lets you search not just your history, but Google and other sites as well. So, Chrome goes beyond IE and Firefox by searching the browser history’s page titles as well as page content. The history results show a thumbnail representation of the page as well as the title of the page.
Good compatibility and manners
Taking a page out of Firefox and Opera’s game book, Google links into your bookmarks and kinda into your passwords. It also lets you pick which service you’d like as your primary search engine, and it doesn’t try to force itself on you and make itself the default browser. So, you could say Chrome has good PC manners, which, to be fair, I think is the case in general with Google products. I’m so sick of the take-over artist programs who want to load their application or suite and own your PC.
Mo tabs
It lets you easily start a new tab by just clicking on a plus sign. IE has a similar feature. Firefox requires you to right click and then select to get a new tab.
Yadda
And that silly little misunderstanding about ownership is cleared up. Google has retracted the objectionable sentences in Chrome’s EULA, so that any content you post via Chrome is yours and yours alone. Astounding; people actually read the EULA and found that, imagine having that kind of time.
What do we think?
It’s OK, not compelling. It is the shiny new thing. It will steal users from Firefox and Opera more than Microsoft. The folks who stay with Microsoft IE do so because they are either ignorant about the other choices, lazy, or living in FUD land, so Chrome isn’t going to be much of a lure to them.
Google has spirit and most of us like the company. They don’t take themselves too seriously (case in point is their comic book tutorial http://www.google. com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html) Google’s browser uses WebKit, the same engine that powers Apple’s Safari Web browser.
I’d recommend it for folks who like to experiment. I wouldn’t recommend it for people who have work to do. There are no gains over Firefox and some negative points.
