Google Releases Browser Aka Chrome Beta release

[pedro-kun 0]

I have been using Chrome for a few days now...Here's what I think of it 'till now:Firstly, Chrome is a pretty bad name, giving excessive credit to the underlying framework, lol! Webkit deserves mentions too!And now for the real stuff.I too have seen the comic, and I loved it. As we all use Chrome's beta version, the comic is the only "preview" of the features it will have in the feature, and how they will work; and I must say that the whole browser was well thought up.Google began by fusing the best of the current browsers, which meant grabbing Apple's Webkit, Mozilla's chrome, IE's "simplicity" (very arguable point, here), and A few of Opera's good ideas (such as the speed-dial). While most people here tend to say Google copied everything and think that doing that is a bad thing, I think it is a wonderful thing. Browsers have reached a point where innovation is terribly hard to achieve; they can, however, copy each others features and perfect themselves a little more... and that's what Google did in Chrome.Performance is great. I love clicking that icon and the browser's window appearing in not much time than the startup of notepad. Only Opera had a startup close to this. IE's connections and "preloading" by the system exclude it from the "startup benchmark". Firefox takes a considerable amount of time to startup. Extensions only worsen the case. However, Chrome is still pretty bare bones... We'll have to wait for extensions and future betas to measure real startup times and performance too.Now, the rendering. Unlike some people here, I haven't had any problem whatsoever related to webkit's rendering. I've had scrolling issues with some specific CSS stuff (such as fixed backgrounds, which really slowed Chrome's scrolling down). Despite that, I still think that using (and investing in) Webkit is a great choice. Why reinvent the wheel? We might as well pick up the best wheel we've got and perfect it instead of building one from scratch.The design is also a big plus. I thought I would hate it, but I've come to love it. Simple, clean, pretty straightforward. Tab reordering is smooth (it's a small sparkling detail, lol)... Tab opening and closing is also smoothly animated. However, LOTS of tabs look horribly bad (missing some scroll or multiline options here, i guess). Other than that, I like the url bar UNDER the tabs... because it pretty much makes sense that if a tab is assigned to a site, and that site has an address, then that tab should have its own address bar. The toolbar is also really simple. I don't really like similarity with IE's toolbar (the two little right buttons), but I have to admit it may attract former IE users. I miss a status bar for checking links' urls, etc...Oh, and I must say... the Location Bar is awesome. It certainly is MUCH better than firefox's bar (which is... slow... and lacks some tiny details that Google focused on, such as never getting addresses you never typed in autocompletion, etc...)About the task manager now... It's really cool! Even though chrome still has some memory management problems (heavy use may cause hangups, especially using plugins), this task manager WILL come in handy in the future. It's a really nice feature... And the separate processes for each tab... another delight.A memory hog, many will say... but I have it running with 512MB of RAM in a P4 1.6GHz (FSB 133) and it kicks firefox's and opera's *bottom* any time...... with the exception of flash based sites. Plugin handling is in fact defective. I've tried it in other computers, and Chrome simply degrades horribly when in the presence of flash or adobe's pdf plugin. Using deezer in Chrome is a PITA... really.Anyway, I loved the browser. It's my primary browser on windows, btw. I'm just awaiting a linux version LOL!I know I missed several things... I'm just tired now. Maybe someday I'll talk a bit more about this

[midnightvamp 1]

Wow... I'm thinking the same way as a lot of people here... I already thought it was a pain trying to make sure that my websites looked right on both FF and IE browsers, now I find out that I need to test them and build them on another one. I wonder how popular it is going to become. Knowing Google, it will probably be a big hit. Which could just mean having three different browsers open at all times to make sure things all look right as I'm developing. I wonder how that's going to affect the speed of my computer, seeing how it doesn't always play nice when I have so many programs open to begin with.But of course, I'm going to have to download it, and hey, maybe it will be amazing and become my new browser of choice. You never know, it could happen. I'm always open for healthy competition so long as it makes the products improve in the long run.

[godfather89 0]

Is the new google browser any good. I am hoping it'll be perfect like all other google services. However, I have been told by some friends that it crashes a bit. It's in beta so thats no big deal. Anyone else who has used the google browser yet?