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Burning Chrome
Sep. 4th, 2008 12:08 amSo when I got home I had pumpkin curry and downloaded Chrome.
It worked fine. It started up fast, it is much faster at loading GMail than Firefox. It rendered most complex sites (such as DriveThroughRPG or Games Workshop Australia's online store) faster than any other browser I've used. It uses less memory than Firefox, and it's separate process model allows the memory to be properly released as tabs are closed, meaning it doesn't just keep chewing up more memory like other browsers. I purposefully opened all my bookmarks at once just to see what would happen, and it handled it fine without freezing up either the browser or the operating system. So in a lot of ways it does what it is advertised to do. Downloading and displaying a PDF using the Acrobat plug-in in an integral tab was blindingly fast in comparison to other browsers.
Unfortunately it displays the classic symptoms of a product designed by geeks and rushed out a before thinking about how it would actually be used. The DOM inspector is nice, but useless for people who aren't developers. It didn't give me a choice of which browser to import bookmarks from on installation, defaulting to IE which I don't use, so I had to manually go and do that afterwards. Interestingly, it imported all my stored passwords as well. However, as far as I can tell it has no "manage bookmarks" option, which, as I don't want all my bookmarks under a folder called "imported from Firefox" would have been nice. It also didn't import my tool-bar book marks into it's tool-bar, meaning I have to do them manually and individually as there's no obvious way to manage them except direct drag and drop, which only allows you to drag a single item.
It failed on several sites to. Links and menus that work fine in other browsers, such as the login page from DriveThruRpg were either malformed by Chrome so that the request to load the page failed, or just didn't work, though it's possible this could be a result of browser specific code on the site not understanding a new user-agent type. I managed to log in eventually, but there's obviously some issues. Also, Chrome refused to let me download more than one file from DriveThruRpg at a time, it seems it's restricting each page to a single a pop-up at a time only, though it did queue the pop-up and allow the next one to work in the same window after the first finished... odd. The lack of feedback on clicking links is a bit disconcerting, and I really, really miss image zoom, though if you look carefully it does have text zoom.
Overall, I'm impressed at it's speed and responsiveness, and I'd love to use it, but it's not quite yet ready for prime time yet, it needs a few more features, image zoom, bookmark management, etc., before I could switch to it. It is a beta release, but then Gmail's been in beta how long now?
I'm running Windows XP SP2 Home Edition, on a dual core 5600+ AMD Processor with 4Gb of memory. Smaller machines may not notice the speed differences as much as I did.
It worked fine. It started up fast, it is much faster at loading GMail than Firefox. It rendered most complex sites (such as DriveThroughRPG or Games Workshop Australia's online store) faster than any other browser I've used. It uses less memory than Firefox, and it's separate process model allows the memory to be properly released as tabs are closed, meaning it doesn't just keep chewing up more memory like other browsers. I purposefully opened all my bookmarks at once just to see what would happen, and it handled it fine without freezing up either the browser or the operating system. So in a lot of ways it does what it is advertised to do. Downloading and displaying a PDF using the Acrobat plug-in in an integral tab was blindingly fast in comparison to other browsers.
Unfortunately it displays the classic symptoms of a product designed by geeks and rushed out a before thinking about how it would actually be used. The DOM inspector is nice, but useless for people who aren't developers. It didn't give me a choice of which browser to import bookmarks from on installation, defaulting to IE which I don't use, so I had to manually go and do that afterwards. Interestingly, it imported all my stored passwords as well. However, as far as I can tell it has no "manage bookmarks" option, which, as I don't want all my bookmarks under a folder called "imported from Firefox" would have been nice. It also didn't import my tool-bar book marks into it's tool-bar, meaning I have to do them manually and individually as there's no obvious way to manage them except direct drag and drop, which only allows you to drag a single item.
It failed on several sites to. Links and menus that work fine in other browsers, such as the login page from DriveThruRpg were either malformed by Chrome so that the request to load the page failed, or just didn't work, though it's possible this could be a result of browser specific code on the site not understanding a new user-agent type. I managed to log in eventually, but there's obviously some issues. Also, Chrome refused to let me download more than one file from DriveThruRpg at a time, it seems it's restricting each page to a single a pop-up at a time only, though it did queue the pop-up and allow the next one to work in the same window after the first finished... odd. The lack of feedback on clicking links is a bit disconcerting, and I really, really miss image zoom, though if you look carefully it does have text zoom.
Overall, I'm impressed at it's speed and responsiveness, and I'd love to use it, but it's not quite yet ready for prime time yet, it needs a few more features, image zoom, bookmark management, etc., before I could switch to it. It is a beta release, but then Gmail's been in beta how long now?
I'm running Windows XP SP2 Home Edition, on a dual core 5600+ AMD Processor with 4Gb of memory. Smaller machines may not notice the speed differences as much as I did.
