Thoughts on the Google Chrome Beta

Told you it would get more interesting...

I became aware of Google Chrome almost the instant it was announced/leaked, and took the opportunity on my lunch hour at work to read through the comic book that was put together to explain it's benefits. It wasn't until the next day I downloaded the Beta, which disappointingly is only available for Windows; I am blogging this on my Ubuntu laptop so therefore I'm limited to using it only at work. I have to say I'm a bit impressed. It's got a lot of little touches that make it quite pleasing to use, such as the way that when you have multiple tabs open and close one makes sure that the closing 'X' on the next tab is directly underneath your mouse button. This makes it a lot easier to close more than one tab, since you don't need to keep moving the mouse about.

There are more obvious useful features as well, like the 'New Tab' page which lists your top 9 most visited pages as screenshots as well as your bookmarks on the right-hand side. There's also the way that search and URL entry have been combined into one bar. Type 'football scores' in and you get a Google results page, type 'www.bbc.co.uk' and you get that page.

At a technical level there is the 'sandboxing' security features and the idea of making each tab a seperate process. To get a better understanding I highly recommend reading the comic and of course downloading it...

Overall I rate it's chances of getting a good share of the browser market as fairly high. Already it's as least as good as Firefox and will have a much higher visibility in that it can be plugged on most people preferred search page. Unfortunately there are still the twin 'advantages' that IE has in being the default browser in by far the most common desktop OS on the planet and hosting M$'s corrupt web standards. We'll see how things develop in the long run though.

P.S. For fellow Ubuntu users, the good news is that there is a Linux version in the works but it's still being ported. Of course Chrome is open source, so if you've got the knowledge you can always speed the process by helping out