Google has decided to enter the web browser market, and have released a new beta product called Google Chrome.
It makes sense for Google to create a web browser, since its technology is all web based. Google have released a set of feature explanations via a comic book format. You can also obtain the full comic book series as a single book (rather than separate pages for each).
Current browser problems are:
- technology stagnation, thanks to Internet Explorer having the bulk of the market share
- feature bloat
- security problems
- browser stability, now that we all use multiple tabs when browsing
Google Chrome bring a clean and simple user interface to the web browser.
The main benefit people are talking about is how much faster web surfing is with Google Chrome. Google have released a browser benchmarking tool, so you can compare the browsing speed of your current browser to that of Google Chrome.
In my tests, Firefox 3.0.1 came in at a ranking of 47, and Google Chrome came in at a whopping 423.
I then ran tests against sites such as CNet, MSN, TechCrunch and LifeHacker. I found that Chrome loaded even these web pages faster as well, but not by the same factor mentioned above. Chrome loaded the pages approximately 20% faster than Mozilla Firefox.
Here’s an article diving into more speed test results.
I love the process isolation for each tab and process isolation for browser extensions. This should bring much better availability and stability to the web browser experience.
For now though, I will likely stick with Mozilla Firefox for “normal” surfing, and use Google Chrome for specific web applications I use, such as Gmail and RememberTheMilk. I also can’t live without some browser add-ons such as Roboform, EverNote and Delicious.
But I can see that it won’t be long before sites update their code to include support for Google Chrome, and we can expect to see a very fast and stable web browsing environment.
2008-09-11 Update: Once you’ve learnt the basics of using Chrome, then learn some power user features.
Comments on this entry are closed.