Google Chrome: My Two Cents

Image by payalnic via Flickr

Everyone’s talking about it, so I might as well join in, right?

Installed Google Chrome this afternoon at work.  I was immediately amazed at the speed of it.  It’s very noticable.  For one, the application itself loads up in about 2 seconds, unlike the slow, clunky firefox and IE browsers which take forever to load.  Also, the websites I went to seemed to be a lot faster. A LOT.  For instance, loading my webmail for work is just about instantaneous in Chrome, where as each message takes a few seconds to load in Firefox in IE.  Sure, it’s just a few seconds, but it adds up when you’re looking at your email as much as I am.  As webmail also uses a lot of AJAX calls, those seemed to go off without any problems.  I thought there might be a few snags with the new V8 Javascript Virtual Machine, but after doing an hour or so of jQuery work, I didn’t notice any problems.  Digging a little deeper, I messed around with the “Inspect this Element” function.  Very cool, it’s like a built in Firebug, only without the Javascript debugging (Hopefully that’s in the next release, or maybe I just haven’t found it yet ).  All of the HTML is easily found, and is highlighted in the browser as you mouse over.  Very useful for debugging your HTML when needed.

Only a few bugs that I’ve noticed.  For one, my mousewheel wouldn’t scroll up while I had it’s advanced features enabled.  Closed the mouse application, and it ran fine.  Might just be my PC, but I’ve noticed a couple other people having that problem.  It’s also not customizable at all. Of course, it’s in Beta, so no biggie.  I’m sure that’s down the road abit.

All in all, I think it’s great.  The speed alone makes it a worthwhile download, but I’m not going to make it my default browser yet.  Need those Firefox Add-Ons, I just can’t live without an autofill button   5/5 stars!

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