Chrome
Am toying with Google’s Chrome browser. So far, I like it. Nothing real fancy. It does however, lean heavily on Google’s search capabilities to make the default blank page a lot more usable than “You’ve opened a new tab”. So far it hasn’t really helped me any, but I think over time and usage, it will become a lot more of an asset. It does seem faster, but I have a feeling they’re not worrying themselves too much about phishing and other malware that has slowed down Internet Explorer. We’ll see. I actually wrote this post using Chrome and it seems to work perfectly here whereas there is some bugginess with IE7. My over-all thought so far is this is definitely a thumbs up experience. Much more so than Firefox or Safari ever was for me. I haven’t used it enough yet to say whether or not to toss Explorer in the garbage yet, but I have a feeling that’s just a matter of time.
UPDATE 10/24/2008: I am switching computers at home. I won’t be re-installing Chrome. I have run into way too many shortcomings and problems with it. Mainly with any type of video streaming or java intensive sites. I am not one of those anti-Microsoft people, so Internet Explorer more often than not works fine for me. It certainly is a lot more reliable at this point than Chrome has been. It is fast, but so far that has been it’s only upside.
Tags: chrome, firefox, google, internet explorer, microsoft, safari
Yeah, I downloaded it yesterday also. Its not bad. My only problem is that I cant find a way to get to my home page easily. Most browsers have a button for Home. Chrome doesnt see to have one unless Im missing something.
Click on the options button. Choose options. The first options page should be labeled “Basics”. Click the “Show home button on the tool bar.” You’ll then see the home button.
My bill will be sent via a separate email.
Thanks. I missed that on my initial tour of the options panel.
Well, I was like you in that the first thing I noticed was no home button and thought that was curious. I did find the option pretty quick to turn it on. If I hadn’t, I probably would have deleted the program. That feature is just way too useful for me to do without given the fact that all the other browsers use it by default.
In the process of finding that option, I was kind of surprised at how few options there are. This thing is pretty much a bare bones product that does the one thing it does very well, prompt you to use Google. And, since I’m a Google junkie, that’s a major selling point. However, I do expect Microsoft to counter with something a lot more useful than “you have opened a new tab”. How lame is that?
Malware and spyware stuff is virtually built into Google now for all platforms and browsers, if you search and try to hit a malware site (even some “legit”) hacker type sites, it will warn you. As for in-browser protection, I did see a malware/phishing option in the Chrome options.
One thing a LOT of people (not you or me) need to remember is this is a very early public BETA. Given the state of Betas of other software out there, I am VERY impressed with Chrome. I’ve not run into a single bug yet outside of rendering issues that are inherent to the Webkit rendering engine being used.
One cool feature people might not understand is “Create Application Shortcut” … It basically allows you to create an icon for a webpage that when opened from the short cut, gets rid of all the “chrome” in Chrome…. Only the browser’s title bar shows… If you built a webapp that’s like a desktop app, it allows you to create a browser shortcut to make it “feel” like a real application. This wil be huge as the new “cloud apps” get more mainstream. The Mozilla equivalent to this is called Prism and is still in early beta…
Chrome’s not the most memory efficient, although it protects each tab in a different process, but it is definitely, IMHO, the fastest browser out there now in the mainstream.
Written in Chrome
I’ll agree with about all of that. I’ve not had any security issues, but I rely more on my firewalls and anti-virus software and often felt the built-in stuff in browsers created more problems than solutions. I haven’t tried the web app function yet, but really am so used to browsing it doesn’t make any real difference to me. As far as rendering goes, I’ve had no issues whatsoever. All in all, it’s a keeper even in beta. Now, the caveat with Google of course is sometimes their products stay in beta for years. It works fine, and they update it, but they for some unknown reason won’t drop the beta designation. So, for Google to say something’s in beta means nothing to me. As with any product, if it works, it works. If it don’t, I delete it.
Here at home, I’m doing a test using the “Application Shortcut” to try and replace my thunderbird email, Firefox browser and basic MS Office functions with Google Gmail, Chrome and Google Docs for a while to see how well I can function.
I’ll let you know.
As for network protection, I use a different DNS on my home WiFi router that adds an additional layer of protection, but is highly configurable… It’s called: OpenDNS and is particularly good to block kids from certain specific sites, certain genres of sites, etc… Very powerful and very free.
Done at the router level using DHCP on each workstation, it’s very difficult for youngsters to realize how it’s blocking them.
I also have an invisible proxy firewall that does it too…
Of course it lets me through to everything though.