We finally decided, amongst all of the hype, to give Google Chrome a spin and see how it compared to our current favorite, Firefox 3. We were pleasantly surprised in many ways, but somewhat disappointed at the same time. The following is our first impression of the new browser and what we think they left out.

First Impressions

We were first impressed with the small payload of the installation file. This meant short download time and a very fast installation. We were then asked to import our bookmarks and were again very pleased with the ease and speed of importing our large accumulation of bookmarks. So with the installation and setup behind us, we set out to take it for a drive.

Pages seem to download a bit faster than with Firefox, but we can’t be sure. I understand that the browser uses the Mozilla engine so the pages are probably rendering at the same speed as in Firefox. We opened up some of our development projects web sites in tabs and were happy to see they all rendered as planned.

We then had a look at some more technical items. We pressed Ctrl-Atl-Del on the keyboard to bring up a list of processes and found that each tab has it’s own process and takes it’s own individual slice of the computer’s memory. This is different from Firefox which continues to allocate memory to a single process every time you open a new tab and a new web site. What does this mean to non-technical people?

If a web site causes a crash, it is likely (though not confirmed) that only that tab will crash and not the entire browser. While Firefox has addressed this by asking if users wish to “Restore a Previous Session” after a crash, it seems as if the folks at Google have thought this through a bit further and organized the memory allocation in a very straight forward and clean manner.

The user interface is clean and they take advantage of as much screen real estate as they can by not cluttering it up with tool bars and status bars that few of us use regularly.

In summary, we were very pleased with our initial experience.

But something is missing

One of the biggest and most noticeable things to us of features that were missing was the Google Toolbar. Google has been plugging this product and a great majority of us have had this toolbar installed for ages. However, there is no toolbar included and many of the toolbar features are not available. This is where it got even more notifiable to us.

We use Google Bookmarks in many of our SEO efforts to help develop links to various sites. As such, we have built up quite a large number of bookmarks that are stored on Google Bookmarks. So we were very surprised that there was no offer to import those bookmarks or get to them other than through the web site. This seemed to be an obvious tool that should have been included on day one. I also use an add-on in Firefox called FoxMarks that allows me to sync my bookmarks across my varying computers. Google Bookmarks, if properly integrated into Chrome, could certainly give Foxmarks a run for their money and give Chrome a slight advantage.

This brought to light the fact that there is no feature yet in place for add-ons. We use nearly a dozen add-ons and even more plug-ins in our Firefox installation and cannot justify a move to Chrome just yet. Perhaps the features that we are hidden away in a place we didn’t or have yet to be released. Either way, there is still plenty of potential for this browser and it will be interesting to see where it goes in the coming months.