Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Google Chrome feels much better

The verdict is out. Google’s new browser – christened Google Chrome - is a good experience. It is certainly a respite from the traditional IE which hangs very often and asks you foolishly to send an error report to Microsoft. If one guy has lost his broadband windows to some inactive page, I presume he’ll be frustrated. There is not much point in asking him to send an error report to Microsoft. All that guy needs is a new broadband window where his pages are retrieved. This happens in Mozilla and Google Chrome is one step ahead. It can import all the active broadband pages from the browser on to itself to prevent data loss.

Google Chrome was out on September 2. I, much like many other geeks downloaded it the same day, and made it the default browser. It was a good experience to open web pages in Chrome. The name is chick and so is its presentation. The tabs are rich blue in colour and the sites open faster without break. The logo is vibrant has a mix of daring red, green and yellow in it. The browser can –

  • Predicts the possible urls while user is typing it on the browser. This makes it easier for user to hit at the right address
  • Save all the pages and present it as the frequent pages visited by the user
  • Store the last page (and even the sub-page) visited by the user for quick recall and reference. Of course one can change the setting and can get rid of this feature, but it will be useful when one needs to go to sub-links again and again say share brokerage sites, news sites etc
  • Has a ‘+’ icon to add a tab instantly to the active window
  • Downloading (documents/excels/presentations) happens in just seconds. The downloaded documents appears as an icon on the left-bottom corner of computer for easy recall and access
Over all there are mixed reviews about the product. People have liked its easy loading and recall but have mooted down its FAQs.

What’s your take about it? Have you downloaded or tried the Chrome? Are you excited about a new browser service?

Do post your opinions and reviews in the comments section.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'd downloaded Chrome the day it was launched. But removed it within an hour. Has a lot of loopholes. Had downloaded it again after a few days. Again found it to be insufficient. after using Firefox now for over six years, I feel, Chrome has a lot of catching up to do. Firefox has 1000s of Extensions and you just have to think how ou want your browser to behave and Voila! there is an extension available for it. In fact Opera and Safar are better than Chrome as of now. As for Firefox, I miss the Opera's inbuilt email-client. Thunderbird has to be downloaded separately.

But I'm sure with the backing of Google, Chrome would catch up soon, particularly when Google is trying apps and to bring the desktop and browsing experience together. It's Gears has already caught my fancy which helps in downloading supported sites faster and particularly Gmail which can be accessed now offline. But that can be done in Firefox too with a small extension.

By the way IE always sucked. It's by default that it comes along with Windows that people have to cope with it. But people using Linux are not troubled by it. The bad part is that the Windows explorer is integrated with IE hence people can't really uninstall IE. But I'll have to accept that Microsoft Office is far better then OpenOffice right now. Sun has to do a lot of catching up, if OpenOffice has to be adopted by the community. But a lot of companies have already switched over to OpenOffice or Star.

But I'm digressing. The topic was Chrome. Try Firefox. And customise it with extensions, I'm sure you'll never want any other browser.