Google Chrome

I've just downloaded it and now, I'm writing you my first hand experience with new browser, released by Google.

Installation

You can only download setup that downloads required files. This can be an advantage since installer can collect additional information about system and (such as type of the processor you're running) and downloads executable files targeted for your processor family (I'm not sure if this is a case in Google chrome, though).

First run

During first run you can opt to import  bookmarks and password data, browsing history, etc. from Internet Explorer (interesting enough it does not do the same for Mozilla Firefox, even though you have an option to do it manually). I will not comment on reason behind such behavior :).

First grips

Browser has nice feature that is called Task manager. It specifies the amount of memory that each tab is allocating. Interestingly enough, each tab is running as a separate process (personally I welcome that even though memory consumption may be a bit higher - I've no figures to support that but each process requires some of the memory to allow manipulation by OS). Advantage (much bigger than the disadvantage described) is that tab cannot crash whole browser (something Mozilla Firefox is more prone to do it).

What I don't like is the fact that windows are subclassed and rendered using alternate UI look & feel, different to that set by your operating system (same applies also to GoogleTalk and MSN Live messenger). I hate that. All well behaved applications should look and work the same as defined by operating system (visual appearance of forms, mouse gestures, standardized accelerator keys and shortcuts, system dialogs for open/save, etc). There is plenty of innovative things to be implemented and hacking your UI appearance should not be one of them :).

Google Chrome in that retrospect fares no different than GoogleTalk. It has a bit different UI than other browsers (actually I like it for its simplicity). Some of the minor things bother me such as opening TaskManager and switching between programs with Alt+Tab and wondering why TaskManager is still on top of all others. But I guess there must be good reason behind that and since it can be turned off it is not annoying so much).

What I like is that View source/View page source command opens new tab with syntax highlighting. Too bad it doesn't perform tidying of HTML :).

Maybe it was never meant to do that since you have JavaScript console.

Search is also very intuitive (it renders all matching words with yellow background color and current marked match with orange.

About:memory is nice I believe Google has set a goal to release a browser more conservative on resources than other browsers :)

Last but not least

In next days I will use Chrome for my daily browsing tasks so I can get more experience with it (and write another blog post about it ). I hope both of us will get along with each other.