Google Chrome Beta - At Last......

At last, its here. The browser I have been waiting for ages. The browser from Google. Google Chrome. I had heard a lot about it. Yesterday, I was surprised to see the news of its launch at the official Google Blog. After seeing and using all the other products from Google, I was sure this one would also be one of its kind. I went forward and downloaded it from the Google Chrome site.

Interface & Appearance

The interface looked quite simple. No fancy animations or other such affect. Just a basic skin, with the standard browser buttons. Ofcourse, like all other browser, it too has a tabbed structure. That is one of the best thing I like about the modern browsers. No menubars are available. All the menu items are stacked in to the last 2 buttons to the right of the address bar. Most of the menu items are the standard ones found in any other browser. So, I am not going deep into it.

The tab structure does have a very unique feature not found in any other browser. You can simply drag a tab out of the browser to create a new window containing that page. Infact, dragging tabs between various open windows of Google Chrome is a breeze.

Speed & Memory Usage

At first use itself, I felt it had more speed that all the other browsers I used (Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla Firefox 3, Opera 9, Flock 2,...). All pages seem to load quickly. Ofcourse, my calculations could be wrong, considering the fact that, my Firefox and Flock browser are clogged with dozens of Add-ons installed. Next, I decided to check the memory and CPU usage using Prcoess Explorer. Here, I got a real surprise. I had around 7 chrome.exe running in my system. After a bit of study, I understood the fact that, for each tab you open in the browser, a different EXE is launced. In simple worlds, if you have 10 tabs open in the browser, it is (i assume) equivalent to running 10 instances of the browser. I am not sure about the implication of this on the system resources over time.

Webpage Compatibility

I didnt have much problem loading most websites. But, many Ajax based sites like Hotmail are not likely to work. I was surprised when the Yahoo! Mail's Ajax interface did work in the browser. The explanation is simple, Google Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine used by a few other browsers such as Apple's Saffari. Gmail worked perfectly with the browser. Ofcourse, no surprise there, what else would you expect from a browser created by Google itself.

Security & Stability

From what I have heard, it seems Security is one of the main focus of Google Chrome. Infact, I guess this is the reason why each page is run as a different process. Each process runs like a sandbox with very limited access to the outside world. The browser also maintains two seperate updated blacklist (one for phishing and the other for malware).

Stability is also one important part of the browser. Most users love to have lots of webpages open and running. Here again, the benefit of running each webpage in a seperate process is that, if a webpage gets crashed, it would not affect the other open pages. To make things even better, it also has an integrated taskbar that displays all the open page instance of the browser. It also displays Memory Usage and CPU usage for each seperate page.

Few More

The browser does have a few other unique features integrated into it. Google Gears is one of them. It is a most promising standard from Google to support Off-line storage of data for supported websites. The best use of this is for the various web applications being created that need not have a server to run, but will need to store various data on the local system. Google Chrome also has a "Create Application Shortcuts" used to create shortcut for your commonly used Web-application on the Desktop, Quick Launch, or Start Menu. When run in this mode, the application will not display tabs or address bar. In effect, you get a full-screen display of the web-application.

Read Original Review At: SoftReview.co.cc