few hours ago I wrote a blog post about google's chrome browser, now it has been released and I've spent a couple of hours toying around with it a bit.
You can read about the technical specs of the new browser here.
First impressions
The good
It's slick, the user interface is bare bones. No menu's to speak off no title bar, it starts with tabs and there are some browsing essential buttons (refresh, back, forward) the usual.
It's fast, loading pages feels fast, browsing through the pages also feels fast.
It includes its own taskmanager, this is ideal for flash ads slowing things down, when you have a lot of pages open with flash ads things tend to get slow, just kill it with the task manager and you've got speed back.
Autocompletion in the Javascript console
Best popupblocker implementation I've seen in a while.
Nice unintrusive downloadmanager.
If you need to use webmail, use this browser, thats basicly because the javascript engine is FAST.
Hotmail doesn't yet work with this browser or at least the advanced mode doesn't yet work with this browser,, but google's own gmail flies with it.
One of the early benchmarks for Chrome can be found here.
The bad
F1 = for help - not so in chrome.
View Source = right click + somewhere in the popup list - not so in chrome
The middle mouse button scroller is gone.
Memory usage is quite hefty, probably the biggest user of memory of current browsers. Firefox 2, might have used more.
I don't understand the autocompletion in the Javascript console.
Noooo, not another browser I need to test :(
My thoughts
The timing is right for this release, the most impressive thing about this browser is the Javascript engine which is currently the king of the round in terms of speed.
Problem for google is that Firefox is working on a new Javascript engine which will be a lot faster.
Safari, same thing.
Also the target market for this browser seems to be the people which aren't very technical, It has simplified browsing written all over it and that is a good thing :)