Google Chrome Review!

Google recently released their internet browser: a nifty little program called Chrome. You can check out the technical details of what makes their browser different than Internet Explorer or Firefox at their website, but I thought I would post my impressions after having used it for a few weeks. Keep in mind, I've been using Firefox exclusively for the past three or four years, minus a few trips with I.E. whenever I needed to upgrade a Windows component or watch online Netflix movies. 

Pros:

• Chrome is FAST! The same websites noticeably load faster in Chrome over Firefox. This is very apparent with GMail. After the "new" GMail was introduced with a progress bar filling up after you log in, I'd noticed that it slower load times than before the upgrade with Firefox. In Chrome, I'm back to getting at my e-mail seconds faster.
  
• Home page. The default homepage of Chrome consists of two things: nine small windows displaying thumbnails of the websites you visit most frequently, as well as a box containing the last nine webpages you bookmarked. The small thumbnail windows are much more practical than having multiple tabs (as homepage tabs) open up in Firefox, and they update on the fly. Start visiting my blog more and more? Slowly, it will creep into your top nine and you can simply click the thumbnail whenever you start up Chrome. What makes it nice over multiple home tabs is that I don't have load each one upon the startup of the program. They are there if I want them, but if not I can start browsing immediately without having to wait for my homepage(s) to load. Although, I guess this isn't too different than having either your Bookmarks window open or have link buttons at the top of your browser in Firefox/IE.
• Address/Search Bar combined into one. I'm not one to make wild claims, but I think I was a pioneer in the field of only using one bar. In Firefox, I had completely gotten rid of the address bar and used the search bar for all my browsing needs. If I want to Google something, I would just type it into the search bar. If I wanted to go to http://www.netflix.com, I would write Netflix into the bar and click the first link. It was practical to me. Chrome has one upped me, as one can enter both a hyperlink address as well as search from the same bar. In addition, when you start typing, it will start autofilling in what it thinks you want -- if I start typing, "Netf", the Netflix website will fill in the bar, and all I have to do is hit the Enter key. Or I can scroll down the list, which will include both websites that I had visited with the matching term, as well as common search queries. 

Cons:

• I'm not sure how safe it is. As a relatively new program, I'm concerned about potential security breaches and flaws. I've stuck with Firefox to do any online purchases or deal with online financial matters.
• I'm used to having tabs on the bottom. Call me wierd, but I figure that being used to having individual windows (from the Internet Explorer days) on the bottom Taskbar, it would make sense for tabs to be down there. Using the Tabbrowser Preferences extension for Firefox, I was able to do that. I have yet to find such a thing for Chrome. *Side note: Tabbrowser Preferences has not been updated to work with Firefox 3.0.1. or 3.0.2., so it's all at the top now anyway.
• No spell-check. With Firefox whenever you typed something into a text box it would automatically put a redline under a mispelled word (like Microsoft Word). No so much in Chrome. Luckily, Blogger has a built in spell checker.... *Edit: Apparently Chrome does have a spell checker! So why it doesn't work for me all the time is the real question...

Final Thoughts: The combined address/search bar is worth the transition to Chrome alone. The homepage thumbnails are practical and something I use everyday, and there are small touches here and there that you discover while using Chrome that make you wonder, "how come no one else thought of that?" It has a simple and clean interface with no menu bar up top nor progress bar on bottom, and I encourage everyone to give it a try for a week and see what they think. It's going to be a while before I put credit card information through Chrome, which means Firefox has some life on my computer yet. But for my internet surfage purposes, Chrome has become my browser of choice.