In continuation with my previous article I finally managed to download Chrome and start using it today.
Here is what my first experience with it was ...
First off, I would like to say that sadly I'm still using Firefox to post this, keep reading to see why...
Seeing yesterday's screen shots of the browser made it look kind of simple and plain, but after having used it for some time now I'm really enjoying the amount of screen real-estate that Chrome offers, and the separate URL bar for each tab isn't really a big deal at all, you get used it right away.
Google's done away with the title & Staus bar's and instead the topmost part of the window is the tab itself which looks kinda cool.
The next change you can feel is the speed at which it renders pages. It's blazing fast for the pages it can render (and yeah the separate process per tab is quite true :) you can see that in the TaskManager). The Chrome Task Manager is another great feature that shows you CPU, Network and Memory usage (there is also a "Stats for Nerds" that shows a lot more detail).
Ok, so that was the good part, now for the not so good part...
I wasn't able to open several sites a few of which are Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger (actually pretty much any site that uses my Google id to authenticate), a few bank website's and several pages in my intranet (yeah yeah I know it's beta but still I'd expected at least an error to show up not a blank page).
With Gmail and the Google Docs, I was able to get the login screen initially, but nothing after that and the funny thing is trying to open a new window now does not even give me the login screen (maybe it thinks I still logged in and is unable to display that?). I was using Chrome from behind a proxy that uses proxy server scripts, but I don't think the folks at Goog would have forgotten to test for something like that. From the Chromium bug submission list, I see that this is a problem faced by many other users behind proxy servers and I'm hoping they resolve it soon.
RSS feeds also do not seem to be supported as yet :(, which definitely is something that any self-respecting browser in this age should support, and kinds of make me wonder why Goog was rushing to launch Chrome so early (maybe IE 8's recent launch has something to do with this?).
An other point to be noted, is that you need to have a moderately good system to really use Chrome, a 1 GHz machine I have (!!) simply started crawling when I tried it out.
Anyway overall I did enjoy using Chrome but using it really makes you aware that it is still Beta, and I'm really hoping that changes soon...
4 comments:
Seeing that the Google authentication bug (behind proxies) is still not resolved and also having faced problems with several other sites (secure ones mostly), I have moved back to Firefox and IE as my browsers of choice for now.
Am quite disappointed with Google and am hoping they will be able to get their act together sometime soon at least.
I dont see the need of a new browser......I dont see a difference in the Chrome experience.
Yes from what I've seen so far Google seems to have botched up with Chrome and are struggling to fix the various issues.
I'd rather use Firefox.
Chrome has finally come out of Beta today.
Not sure if that makes a difference now but it feels better to use now I guess. :)
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