« The UK Government Gives Phorm the OK | Home | Run for the Hills: The Internet is Running Out of IP Addresses »
Reviewed: Google Chrome Web Browser
By John F | September 23, 2008
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.
Recently Google released their own browser to take on the big boys of Internet Explorer and Firefox. It’s still in a Beta release stage and I have been using it since it was made available to download.
The Positives
One of the positive aspects of Google Chrome is the speed. It is faster than IE7 and Firefox 3. I can’t give you percentage figures of how much faster, but suffice to say that Chrome is much faster than Internet Explorer 7 and a little faster than Firefox 3.
It has the normal tabs feature which is a major requirement for any browser these days. When you start Chrome you see thumbnails of the most frequently viewed pages and further list down the right hand side. This is a very handy feature. It can be turned off to input a particular homepage if you wish.
The download manager is straight forward and nifty. There is also a crash control, so if a website you have open crashes or locks, it won’t take down your computer and require a restart. However I have found the opposite of this. Please see below in negatives section.
The incognito mode is very handy for when you want to leave no trace of your Internet browsing history. Private browsing for all sorts of private means here!
The Negatives
Google Chrome does have an import setting so you can import IE or Firefox settings. I chose to import my IE7 settings and it only imported about 65% of my favourites and settings. I tried this again manually and got the same result. I know when I first downloaded Firefox and imported from IE I had no problems at all.
My main gripe is that for no apparent reason Chrome will freeze and my computer locks up. I have a decent spec machine and both IE7 and Firefox do not lock out my machine. This happens at least once a day when I’m using it. I don’t know why, and I hope when Chrome is fully released it will be fixed.
Also Chrome won’t allow me to log into Hotmail as I see a message telling me to use Firefox or IE. Oh dear Google, this issue needs addressing.
Overall
I will keep Google Chrome on my computer and when the few issues are fixed I’m sure it will take over from me using IE. I love Firefox, so it won’t take over me using the ‘Fox. My advice is give it a go while it’s still in beta release, however if you do wait until it’s out of beta you aren’t missing a huge deal at the moment.
Topics: Free Software Usefulness, Other Computer Usefulness |