I am proud to put my happy fanboy glasses on and say that I installed Google Chrome on its first day. Better yet, I am writing now using it. Can you believe Firefox is no longer the cool kids’ browser. So sad. So what do I think of it having used it for precisely 10 minutes:
Yay:
- Wicked Fast
- Sorta cute looking
- Search in the address bar works very well
- Design outside of Mozilla’s reach
- Process-based design is interesting, maybe it can actually work, hey think outside the box, yo
- Download manager looks like the Firefox Download Bar extension, only looks waaaaay better
- No Mac version. Please talk to the genius at the genius bar. I am bitter.
Nay:
- No ad blocking. Yeah, Google – the ad people – will let you f- with that. I bet that is like, motivation #1 for this whole adventure
- A remarkably sad day for web developers. Not only are companies going to want to test for another browser like Safari or god have mercy, Opera, you really need another pain in the but in the form of Chrome. And yeah, it renders like Safari, but its JavaScript is all new. Wheee
- No integration yet with del.icio.us and web developer tools that make Firefox sing
- Google needing to support users on Windows. Welcome to hell.
- Only god know which nameless, oh-so-private stats are being collected on us when we use a product from a company that makes money off of that. Yeah, it’s open source, but did you read a million lines lately?
- Facebook not like, 100% with Chrome: The next/previous links in the Facebook image gallery don’t work; the comment on news feed stories do not work; photo tagging is a fail too; the more I try the list gets longer – in short, FB is shafted in Chrome. Petty, I know, but I am sharing. Doubt Facebook, on the Microsoft side and a Google wannabe anti-Christ, wants to care.
Regardless, I root for Google. Another ballsy, way beyond uber-cool idea. Seems to be running. Was a pain to download because apparently they are so deluged with requests it hurt their servers.
How’s this for low-to-lowest brow review?
One reply on “Google Chrome: First Impressions”
Another important missing thing: debugging. There’s no Firebug / Firebug equivalent!
AND they stripped out the HTML5 workthread/offline functionality (that is the standards version of Google Gears). Which I find fascinating. It is in the code from Webkit, and they intentionally removed it…replacing it with Gears. That’s not a good sign from our supposedly do-no-evil Google.
No Googasm here.