Google’s new web browser (known as ‘Chrome’) has been released in Beta version and promises great things.
After a very painless download and install, we have been playing with it this morning and overall impressions are fairly good, although our lovely new site looked appalling in it – some rapid changes to the style sheet have helped although there are a few bugs to iron out…
Despite the initial reaction of “Oh no! Not another browser to have to test and why can’t all browsers interpret CSS in exactly the same manner“, the overall experience is a positive one and the new browser does appear to be fairly quick.
Speed is perhaps the greatest hope that we have for the browser – we typically have multiple tabs open and there can be a noticeable lag when using IE or Firefox (especially IE which can take a very long time to open on occasions as it loads up each tab).
Google Chrome promises great speed and, at first glance, appears to deliver.
Another very obvious change is the ‘all in one’ url bar – this now serves as a search AND url bar, which actually works very well. It also helps reduce the real estate taken up by the various toolbars / search boxes that you tend to end up with at the top of your browser window, which is a real bonus.
Too early to tell whether it will really make any difference but our initial impressions are positive and the assault on Microsoft is gathering pace (the more we use Google Docs, the more impressive we find it).
Do we need another web browser? Probably not, but it is worth downloading (link on www.google.com) to try out and no doubt the future will bring a host of plug ins which, for us, make Firefox the current web browser of choice.
***UPDATE***
We managed to crash the new browser using the site placement tool in the main adwords interface. Seems ironic that the only site that broke it so far was Google’s very own…
There are some very nice features (e.g. element inspection when right clicking on anything on the web page) but the lack of the Google toolbar is a very surprising oversight.
