Here's the skinny on Chrome from those of you who've already taken it out for
a spin:
Chrome is nice...but no dice. After succumbing to the overwhelming buzz
about the browser, I was one of the first in this part of the world to get
my copy. My immediate impression (from using the browser and reading the comic)
is that the Google Chrome team designed the browser for the pages, not for
the humans browsing.
Reload All Tabs (or Refresh All, in IE talk) is missing. Imagine your
Internet connection going off briefly, and you have like 19 tabs open (after
all, memory usage isn't an issue). You will have to refresh each page one
at a time. Also, when Flash crashed in one of my tabs, it crashed in all tabs.
Where is the isolation? "Evil:%" as a link on mouse-over or typed
in the "omnibar" crashes Chrome completely, warranting a restart.
Also, it had a problem handling a certain malicious site I came across.
-Anonymous
I love Chrome. Yes, it is sparse, but it doesn't have the excess baggage
and Band-Aids of 10 years of kludges. Its approach to security, processes
and even compilation of JavaScript are all innovative and it shows. It seems
rather solid for a beta (a shame it used the unpatched version of WebKit as
the MS press hounds are HOWLING about insecurity already).
I imagine that what Google did with Chrome is very similar to what MS
needs to do with Midori: start from scratch based on today's paradigms.
-Rob
I have tried Chrome briefly. One of my home pages is a Microsoft personalized
Live page. I could log into my Live account but the personalized pages would
not display -- it always went to the Live search screen no matter what I did.
I also could not figure out how to get the bookmarks listing to always be
open on the left side of the program as in IE and Firefox. When you have a
wide screen, there's plenty of room to have that open and still have horizontal
space for page display. It did seem faster than IE but about the same as Firefox.
Biggest concern is what Chrome is doing under the covers to track activity
and report back to Google. Call me paranoid but...
-Jim
I gave Chrome a whirl and I've been kind of puzzled by the number of people
that say it is so much faster than other browsers. I did a side-by side comparison
on three of our own sites that are kind of slow and I did not see any appreciable
difference in performance between Firefox 3, IE 7 and Chrome. I did like the
sparse layout so that more of the page shows in the browser, but it wasn't
as big a difference as I thought it would be. Overall, it is a nice browser
but as someone who works at a Web design firm, my main reaction is, "Great,
another browser to test against." Oh well, more work for us.
-Cameron
I tried Chrome on Vista Business and got an execution error. It loaded
the interface but I could not load any pages.
-David
I thought I had a solution in Chrome only to be disappointed
once again. I have two Gmail accounts. Firefox only allows me to have one
opened at a time (I open them both, but when I access one account, the other
one automatically gets signed out). I thought for sure Chrome was the answer
-- especially after reading the introductory comic strip about different access
for each tab and how crashing one would not crash any others. I -- foolishly,
it appears -- concluded that since the tabs were not synched together in any
way, I could open both Gmail accounts and access them without fearing one
would get logged out.
Not so. In Chrome, the same symptom appears when I open both accounts;
accessing one for action signs out the other. Perhaps only one may run from
any single machine? Not the case. I open one in Firefox and the other in Chrome
and both may be accessed in turn without knocking the other offline. My conclusion:
Chrome is smoke and mirrors. Great concept, poor execution. Perhaps I'm not
knowledgeable enough to understand how it works. If all the tabs in Chrome
work independently of each other, how would it know to sign one Gmail account
offline when the other is accessed without knowing that I'm opening both accounts
from the same machine in two different browsers? My head hurts.
-Earl
There is a big difference between bundling, as the original writer apparently
intended (embedding), and John's interpretation. IE was and still is embedded
and can never be removed completely without doing irreparable damage to the
OS. I agree that the browser market share stems significantly from this embedding.
If, instead, the browser was just a bundled app on top, not unlike AOL's offerings
(and others), then a great many people would immediately download their browser
of choice and delete IE.
Instead, it is a question of why have two browsers if I have to have
the one anyway. By your statements, John, how can anyone use any ISP other
than AOL? That is how.
-Thomas
Jeff had the correct idea, even if he used the wrong word to express it.
IE does not come 'bundled' with the OS; it is a component of the OS. John
is incorrect in his assertion that one needs a browser in order to download
anything, particularly another browser, from the Net. That's why one can use
FTP. Yeah, yeah, I know, try telling that to your normal PC-challenged user.
I can remember when IE did come separately from Windows. It is precisely because
MS has made IE a basic component of its OS that I despise it so much. The
only reason I ever use it is to visit Windows Update occasionally to check
on patches. Otherwise, I use Firefox and even obsolete Netscape 9. As far
as how one can get the first browser on a new machine if IE were once again
separated from the OS, since most people buy their computers with the OS already
installed, and since most vendors include massive amounts of "extras"
that are suitable only for deleting, these vendors could easily include installation
media/packages for each of the popular browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera,
IE, even Netscape, despite its obsolescence. MS would finally begin to get
an accurate guage for its market share and there could finally be real competition.
I'm confident that IE would be left eating EVERYONE's dust.
-Anonymous