Google’s New Chrome Browser Is Great
Yesterday Google announced the launch of a new browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox, and today they released it. It’s called Chrome, and I’ve been using it all day.
I’ve got to say that I’m pretty impressed. I’ve been a dedicated Firefox user for years now, but Chrome has a few advantages over FF that I think a lot of people are going to appreciate.
First, everything seems to load faster in Chrome. Reading the FAQ’s and forums at Google this is apparently due to some more efficient way of loading javascript, but the explanations go over my head. All I know is that it works.
Second, Chrome’s memory footprint on my laptop is about half of what Firefox’s is. I opened both browsers and loaded the same three pages in different tabs in each (this blog, Gmail and Amazon) and Chrome’s memory usage was about half of what Firefox runs at. Which is nice for me. I use cheap, Wal-Mart laptops because I’m a cheap, Wal-Mart kind of guy. Having a browser that allows me to keep a ton of tabs open without hogging all of my system resources is nice.
Third, Chrome’s tabs are independent of one another. Meaning that if the page you’ve loaded in one tab crashes all your other tabs are fine. Again, for a guy that has dozens of tabs open in his browser all the time (many with blog posts and emails in various stages of completion) that’s handy.
Fourth, Chrome has an “incognito” function that is pretty much what it sounds like. When you open an “incognito” window or tab your browsing is entirely secure. No stored history. No stored cookies. Nothing. I’ll leave it to your imaginations as to what that feature is supposed to be used for.
I’m not uninstalling Firefox from my system just yet, but after a day of using Chrome I think I’m going to stick with it until I find something that makes me not want to any more. Which might not be ever the way things are looking right now.
