7 days with Google Chrome

When Google Chrome was released a week ago, I bravely volunteered to use the browser exclusively for the next seven days. That means no Firefox, no IE, no Opera, only Chrome, with no exceptions. I was fully expecting a week of frustrations, incompatibilities, and annoyances. I was ready to criticize all of the fatal flaws that were sure to turn up. I am happy to say that I was wrong. Google Chrome passes the full-time use test with flying colors.

(You can get Chrome from CNET Download.com.)

One of the first things that people notice when they load up Google Chrome is the gigantic viewing window. Chrome's presentation is very elegant, with the larger than usual viewing window, beautiful animations, browser bar that searches, suggests, and shows history, and a good-looking and highly functional start page. Page searches also show the locations in which your search terms appear in the scroll bar. Surfing has been way easier on my eyes in the past week.

Chrome shows the locations of search terms in the scroll bar.

As everyone else has mentioned, Chrome is really snappy when using Google apps. Gmail and Google Reader work like a dream. Loading each tab in its own process also makes a difference. If you are in the middle of something important, a balky page or Flash element in a different tab doesn't crash everything. During my entire test of Chrome, there was only one instance when the whole browser started choking, but it was able to pull itself out of it. Chrome certainly showed nothing like the crashing issues that pop up with Firefox (although they have been made better with Firefox 3).

Windows Live Mail is incompatible with Google Chrome, suggesting that you "Upgrade your web browser."

The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper if you are a Hotmail user. It seems like this is an easily correctable issue and probably not the fault of Google. Chrome also suffers from the same insanely annoying bug as Firefox, where Flash videos sometimes stop after two seconds.

The thing I missed the most by switching from Firefox to Chrome for the week is the absence of my Remember The Milk todo list in Gmail. Google is promising extensions for Chrome, but doesn't support them yet, so you lose a lot of the functionality that Firefox's extensions provide.

All in all, my experience with Chrome was very positive and it really did not give me any major difficulties. I see Google Chrome potentially winning over some of Firefox's users, especially if they add extensions and get support from the developer community.

Chrome is more than a bright and shiny Google lab experiment. It's a useful browser that is going to steal share from the existing products.

[ace-on-tech]

I've also moved completely from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome without hiccups, and I was a big FF-user since day one. I guess it's the clean UI and general snappiness that did it for me.

[jr_tyrrell]

"The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper"

erm... I use Chrome at work I found by clicking the "Continue to Windows Live Hotmail" shown in the screen grab above everything worked fine. Are you saying it didn't for you? All the page is saying is it doesn't know if your browser supports all the necessary JavaScript. Hardly a showstopper.

[sanjayb]

Figures hotmail would do this. For me hotmail is the worst web email I use these days. I also use Gmail and Yahoo mail.

[plarsen111]

I've seen both. sometimes hotmail worked and sometimes I got the same error

[jandler]

For some reason, Chrome won't work with my gmail...

[bigbwontop]

I can't even reply to people who send me emails in my hotmail with this? HELP!!!!

[saintseminole]

Sounds like an ad for Google, as well as inaccurate. Chrome is "elegant"? No, it just did away with many of the tools, buttons and menus that many of us use every day. You're right that it won't display flash video correctly, but wrong about Firefox -- which has always displayed them correctly, at least for me. "Useful browser?" Not entirely. Even Internet Explorer works better for me than Chrome did, and that's saying a lot.

Unlike Firefox, Chrome is not customizable, has no add-ons (that I could find), and doesn't use "user scripts" -- these are probably the three main reasons people use Firefox. So, if anything, Chrome may steal more IE users, but certainly not FF users.

(Other problems -- wouldn't remember passwords, though it was set to do so, didn't look nice at all, and had glaring problems with the menus, or lack thereof.)

[artapo]

This guy commenting above needs to get laid or lay off the coffee.

I developed software for 18 years. I have used a browser since Netscape 1. I push my browser hard since I frequently have 30 or 40 or 50+ web pages open at one time while researching. That makes IE die, while FF gets increasingly slower. Chrome does not even notice. It just keeps purring along.

The process management in Chrome is so powerful, yet you don't even know it's there -- how ELEGANT!

All this misinformation about "no add-ons" is just a red-hearing, because, being open source, Chrome will soon have all the add-ons you would need.

As for the other small details, well they are exactly that: small details.

I moved from FF to Chrome in a matter of minutes and have not looked back.

So much usability within such a clean interface. Again, how ELEGANT!

Thanks Google!

[lordmorgul]

WoW you're sure quick to declare an early beta product as a failure, using arguments that it does not have what they have already stated it WILL have as reasons it will never be very useful. You are one of the people who should never touch beta software.

[Wiz Zee]

I'm a huge Chrome evangalist. It's super fast.

On the other hand, I tried installing FF3 a few weeks and was very disappointed. It brought my pc to a grinding halt. I had to unistall FF3 and reinstall FF2.

[kickert]

I want it for mac!!

[NathanBliss]

My Rankings

1. Flock
2. Chrome
3. Mozilla Firefox
4. Apple Safari
5. IE
6. Opera

[plarsen111]

Why Flock?

[rapier1]

The biggest problem I've had with chrome is the lack of a non-beta Java RE. Why chrome can't use current JREs is beyond me. Of course, I sometimes think this would be a better world without client side java.

[jhozae]

I just uninstalled it this morning after a week. It crashes...Firefox 3doesn't (hardly). Java doesn't work on it, so I can't use the Hurricane Center site (I live in Miami Beach), which I really needed this week.

Also, there's no plugins, especially no AdBlock. It seems to have no defenses against spyware. There's always spyware to clean, lots more than with Firefox, or even, surprise, IE 8 beta.

It's supposed to be for online apps, but there's no link or anything that would take you to them, or to suggest them. Those little youtube guides were so short and unintelligible as to be useless.

[Joetwopointoh]

"with the larger than usual viewing window"

Care to expand on this? The size of viewing window on my screen is always predicated by the size of my screen regardless of browser in use so this particular comment has me scratching my head. Do you mean there's less real estate taken up by toolbars? I find fullscreen mode (again on any browser) quite useful for maximizing view.

[harrisonh1]

@jr_tyrrell: Good call. I didn't catch that link when I looked at the error page (I usually use Gmail, so I only took a look once). The link is sort of hidden, maybe a button would be better.

@saintseminole: I absolutely think that Chrome's interface is elegant. It's simplistic nature and presentation of animations, including tabs and new downloads, makes for an intuitive and seemingly effortless UI, but you can be sure that they put a lot of work into perfecting it.

@Joetwopointoh: Yes, moving the tabs to above the address bar into an area that's usually just dead space helps to increase the viewing area, something that Firefox doesn't do. The menus are in line with the address bar, taking away another line, giving you more space. Of course you can turn off the bookmarks toolbar (which I did), but you can also do that in Firefox. The status bar at the bottom fades in, only when needed, opening up some more space there. The UI is just slimmer and more compact overall, giving you more space to look at the actual web page.

I can't bring myself to use full screen mode since it covers the start bar and all of my tray icons. At least with this, I still have a very large viewing window, and access to the start bar.

[RavenChylde]

I like Chrome so far. I was not able to log into one of the websites used at my job but the other sites did work correctly and even remembered my passwords. As far as Hotmail or live mail, yes you do get the incompatibility message but once you choose to use the less intensive version of the web interface, you can still access your mail... just not with all the functions.

[08Rabbit]

I still love Opera.

[richardelect]

paypal are blocking chrome as of now. But hey, excellent browser. I just ruined my IE* beta installation - cant uninstall or get it to work but who cares. Chrome really is a pleasure to use and firefox covers paypal and other security issues for the moment.

[richardelect]

to clarify, you cannot use chrome to pay for goods on ebay using paypal. Get a message saying it doesn't like SAFARI!!!

[nesheimbru]

I love it. I have found no problems as I have found with FF and IE9. Not that I might in the future but its speed and simplicity make really attractive and user friendly.

[adkiller2k7]

Also the problem with hotmail affects firefox 3.1(Alpha 2) too

[jjthoele]

How do I get the Google Toolbar for Chrome?
Jeff Thoele
[e-mail]

[cohagan]

Unfortunately Chrome does NOT support RoboForm and, according to the RoboForm folks, it never will. They say the underlying HTML engine is "closed" even though Chrome itself is "open".

[cohagan]

Unfortunately Chrome does NOT support RoboForm and, according to the RoboForm folks, it never will. They say the underlying HTML engine is "closed" even though Chrome itself is "open".

[McGillis]

F11! The inability to conveniently use the whole screen as in MSIE or Firefox is a big oversight. Worse, I can find no way to get there.