Google Chrome

Google has released it's own browser as some might know, it's called Chrome. You can download it from the Google website, but remember: it's a Beta release. Now we at Newanz are webdesigners and web application programmers, this means we have to deal and/or adjust to any changes in the browser market.

So what do we think of it?

Well it's good, but not that shocking. As we read before on sites like Tweakers.net and ZDNet, it's based on the Webkit project. Apple's Safari is based on it too so the engine to read websites is probably the same. Still Chrome is different, it's fast and very user friendly. It's biggest "selling point" (it's a free to download Beta browser) is the speed, but just for that we aren't considering switching to it. It's more for the "simple people" on the internet, who don't need any special features and just want to browse the internet, fast.

Watching

How well does websites load in Chrome? Well probably just as well as Safari, so it's not perfect. The HTML loads well, CSS is always a bit of a strugle (no matter which browser) and Javascripts actually works (not like in Internet Explorer). So far none of our websites or not released projects have had any difficulty beeing displayed correctly in this new browser. The only browser that does has problems with it is still Microsoft's Internet Explorer. We hope Google continues it's development on this project to improve it and make even better. It does holds some nice features like dragging a textarea to make it bigger, clean looking browsing when using tabs and toolbars. Browsers like Opera and Firefox tend to go a little overboard with their toolbars, but this is not the case in Chrome and neither is it in Safari.

Javascript

As Google has included their new V8 javascript engine and we are very happy with it as it includes a javascript error finder. We think this is something most browsers miss. Whenever we try to script javascript, and we say try, we do not know why it does not work, but hopefully now we can. Mozilla will include Tracemonkey in their new Firefox version and we really hope they include something like it.

Our conclusion

Chrome is a great, but simple browser. Luckily it doesn't uses a new strange website compiler so you can just as well compare it with Apple's Safari. We aren't going to use it for anything else then a small check up if the website loads correctly and when we are scripting with javascript. For everyone that doesn't know which browser to use this would probably be a good option. Although we recommend you wait for a final version as we read that Google didn't really lived up to the promise of a stable and secure browser, but that's what you get with Beta versions. Nice to know; we did actually write this post in Chrome! (v 0.2.149.29)

Well, i'm using this browser when it was released. And i'm very happy with the browser, just as you said, its clean and fast.. gmail opens much faster then in IE and FF. I liked the review, but as you said "Although we recommend you wait for a final version as we read that Google didn't really lived up to the promise of a stable and secure browser, but that's what you get with Beta version", you can wait very long until that is going to happen, look at gmail, in beta for 3 years now? so i don't think there will be a final release Kind regards, Nick

Very good to hear you liked the review, the browser is very clean and good to work with. This quote will be good for this one: NiCkYsTyLe you can be very sure the current version is beta. You read the news, Google keeps updating the browser, automaticly of course, to fix a lot of bugs; like the "about:%20" bug which crashes the whole browser (not just the tab, which they said). Maybe the Beta naming at Google is a bit strange and beta's never actually get finished to a final version, but this is one is certainly beta

i know that this is a beta, lots and lots of bug, i've even heard that there are 1200 bugs in Chrome, but i don’t have an online source for that. Let’s hope that Google keep improving chrome more and more. But i think this will keep a Beta, but if we look at Gmail, you can’t notice that that is a beta. so let’s waited until google fixed the bugs

Well I don't think I am seriously going to use this browser. As you all might know and I repeated over and over again, I have been using Opera as my browser for a few years now. And it's not the fastest anymore, but still a great browser. I just read again on Tweakers.net that they released a new version Google Chrome 0.2.149.30 bèta. They didn't tell which bugs they fixed, which is annoying because you want to know if it's more secure and stable or not. Hopefully it will prove itself at some point. Still everyone that is using it, can't blame that you do. It's fast and has some nice features, the only question is... are they really that usefull? Edit: Just found out they keep a list of known bugs, or better yet "Known issues".