Google Chrome

Since I am a big fan of Google's products and services, I've started using Google Chrome. For those of you who don't know, Chrome is an Internet Browser just like Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari. This is my unofficial review of the browser after using it for a couple of weeks.

1. The engine behind it.  Like Safari, Chrome uses the Webkit engine, not that I know anything about this stuff, but I thought I would share.  Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, and IE uses their own of course.  But what I have read, is that Webkit is fast and lightweight, allowing users to get online faster, and have a more pleasant browsing experience.
2. I've been using Chrome for all my Google products, i.e. Gmail, Analytics, Adsense, AdWords, etc…  Chrome is at least 50% faster for these things, as I'd expect being part of Google.  Pages snap into view quickly, while in IE, it is sometimes frustrating at how long it can take to view a simple page.  Google claims the time savings is because they "built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers".  It seems to be working, at least for what I am doing.
3. The layout is plain, simple, and streamlined, much like googles other products, so you can do what you signed on to do faster, surf.  I like the Omnibar too, which is the address bar acting as an internet search field as well.
4. Extremely light on the system load.  I had a Chrome browser open with 3 tabs, and I opened the same tabs in IE and Firefox.  The results were like this. Chrome addressed 33mb of memory.  IE7 was using 162mb!! of memory OMG!! and Firefox was using 46mb.  So you can see chrome is much lighter, and for the average PC having 512mb of memory, these savings are huge over IE.  Firefox does a good job too, but the Webkit engine is obviously smaller than the Gecko engine after seeing this test.

Being a beta version, I'd expect some problems.  One thing is a major security concern that has poppep up, read the article for an explanation.  But one thing that has bothered me is that sometimes Chrome hangs up.  It will sit there for a minute or so, and then go back to normal, not sure why or what is going on, but it does it randomly, not just on page clicks.  I am filing this one under a beta release bug, but the home button thing, I think they should have.  Oh, and the home button needs to be turned on in the options, I think this should be defaulted to on.  I found it while playing around, thankfully.  I was really disappointed that there was no home button. I've made my own home page with my links I use all the time, and it was a pain that I could not get to it easily.

In Conclusion, I give it a thumbs up for the beta version. I can't wait to see what the actual production release will do, we will have to wait and see. As for IE and Firefox.  I am hoping IE8 fixes the inherent problems found in IE7, memory addressing being a huge one.  Firefox is still extremely popular in the development world, because of it's massive library of extensions and plugins.  I use Firefox for application debugging.  I hope google opens up some developer api's, but again it's still to early to tell while it's still in Beta.