Today I took the plunge and downloaded Chrome, the new browser from Google.  I would have done it earlier but for the last couple of days I have been a bit out of it – yesterday I decided to take a quick nap at 7pm and slept through to this morning!  All the fallout from having had a few nights of not being able to sleep well, but now my batteries are re-charged and I have had a play with Chrome, so here are a few first impressions.One main selling point ((if a free thing can have a selling point)) is that each tab is independent enough that if a web site causes a crash it will only crash that tab and not the whole browser.  Not an easy one to test.  The thing is that I have been having Firefox 3 crash a few times so it will be interesting to find out if the same sites crash Chrome and if they do, whether the damage is contained in the one tab.

One good thing about Chrome, as pointed out by my boss at lunch today, is that when you install it you do not have to re-boot the computer afterwards. Itsalways annoying when that happens. Another nice aspect of the install is that Chrome does not take over everything.  It imports all your bookmarks, history, passwords and everything from Firefox and presumably would have imported from IE or Safari instead if I had been using them to download it, but it does not pester you to make it the default, nor does itask you to opt-out of making it the default when you install.  I really hate that, and even more so if you find that loads of unexpected filetypes have had their default application changed.

I was a bit confused by the lack of a home button at first.  But I found out how to add that soon enough. The default home page with thumbnails of most visited sites and a list of recent bookmarks is pretty neat.  I may keep that.  I do, however, find it disconcerting to not have a menu bar.  Not sure what I would want on it, its just that I am so used to having one all the time.

The other main boast about Chrome is that it is fast.  I have not done any sort of comparison, just used it for a bit, but it does seem to be quick.  Certainly it is as fast as Firefox.

The ‘incognito window’  is a very nifty feature.  I can imagine that would be handy to have on shared computers.

One subtle little quirk is how new tabs open immediately to the right of the tab they are called from instead of at the far right, like they do on Firefox. Its a small thing, but very sensible.  Another subtle touch that I like is not having a status bar at the bottom but having a pale blue stripe popup there when you hover over a link.

The only negative points are the lack of options for plugins and the search box.  I am not a big user of plugins: not like Andrew with his 24 Firefox extensions! so the apparent lack of extensions is not a problem, and being open source I’m sure loads of tweaks will appear soon enough.  The search box is a big minus for me though: I tend to use the one in Firefox quite a lot to jump to Wikipedia or IMDb searches.  They are all defined in Chrome butI can’t see how to use them yet.

The previous post was done on Chrome and nothing went wrong with all the pop-ups that are now in WordPress, so that is a good sign.  The one major difference with WordPress is that I do not have the ‘Turbo’ option with Chrome, which is ironic.  That means I do not have Google Gears enabled.  To be honest I am not going to explore that yet as I am not 100% sure how it will affect me having two different browsers caching components of WordPress locally.

I will continue playing around, but right now I am inclined to stick with Firefox, if only for the search box.