Google Chrome Review

Bottom-Line:  All-n-all, I like Google Chrome, but not enough to switch from a browser I now know intimately and well.

I have used some form of Microsoft's Internet Explorer since it was released in the mid '90's.  Granted the browser interface was clunky, slow, ugly, and not very user friendly, but the alternative, Netscape Navigator wasn't much better.  And besides I.E. was free!  

That earlier release of I.E. was based upon the Mosaic web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications' (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  But the now mostly used browser has gone through much iteration's since then, not all of them good, but I.E. is a fairly decent browser, and it remains free!  

Netscape Navigator has long since vanished from the browser field of battle, leaving a scan three solid contenders: Mozilla Foxfire, Apple's Safari 4, and Google's newly released Chrome.

The 411

Chrome is a web browser released by Google which uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, released to the public in December 2008.

The name (Chrome) is reportedly derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers.  Anyone who develops websites for a living is familiar with the term and its functionality.  As of October 2009 Google Chrome was rated as the fourth most widely used web browser, with 3.17% of worldwide usage share of web browsers.

So far on the Windows version of Google Chrome has been released to the public; development versions of the browser for Linux and Mac OS X Operating Systems were released in June 2009.

My Viewpoint

I installed Google Chrome on a Windows Vista Home Premium computer with 4GB of Ram and a Core 2 Duo Intel Processor.  Immediately I was struck by the ability to place a theme on the browser.  To be sure this is nothing practical, but adding a theme allows one to "personalize" the browser.

Apart from the ability to add a theme to the browser, and some subtle interface changes, there is nothing to really set Google Chrome apart from I.E., not really.  Of course there are differences under the hood in the code, but Google Chrome displays web pages no differently than Internet Explorer.

One glaring difference however, is the way the two browsers display Microsoft's Outlook Web Access (OWA) sessions.  While I.E. displays the resulting OWA interface normally, Google Chrome does not; e.g. the text is much smaller, and the graphics renderings are, shall we say, different.

For now I see no compelling reason to use Google Chrome over Internet Explorer. Like I.E. 8.0, each open browser tab of Google Chrome takes up resources (Ram); not as much as I.E. 8.0, but resources are used nonetheless, so there is nothing to be gained from switching on those grounds.  And I am a heavy user of OWA and I can't see myself squinting at the screen just to say I use Google Chrome.  

All-n-all, I like Google Chrome, but not enough to switch from a browser I now know intimately and well.