Well, I’ve been using Google Chrome for about 2 weeks or so now, and here’s what I think of it so far:

• Speed 9 out of 10
  Google Chrome is pretty fast, and some of the applications that I use on a regular basis squirt enormous great forms full of hidden fields at you (out of necessity, I might add). Chrome handles these applications with aplomb, rendering very quickly indeed. Its occasional apparent no-good-reason slowdowns lose it that 10th point though.
• Reliability 6 out of 10
  Reliability, an area Google claim to have worked extremely hard at, isn’t all there. Plugins (especially Flash, my pet hate) can cause problems, yes, but it seems that Chrome can too easily get swapped out, causing massive delays. I’ve had more crashes from Chrome than I have from Opera, Firefox or even (dare I say it) MSIE recently. That said, the redeeming feature is the sandboxing: if one tab falls over, Chrome keeps ticking and can create a new process for the tab quite easily.
• Rendering and web application support 7 out of 10
  It passes the Acid2 test, but there are still some bugs: JavaScript in Facebook was initially broken, and there’s a problem with WordPress stats on a self-hosted blog. Speed’s all very well, but if the app you need doesn’t run, then it still doesn’t run very fast, no matter whether it runs at all.
• Security 8 out of 10
  Well, the malware protection works very well. You can clear browsing data, there’s the incognito mode, and you can save passwords (and delete saved passwords) with ease and clarity. But the carpet-bombing vulnerability - is that fixed or not? It’s difficult to tell from the Google website, or from the about in Chrome. So points lost for that.
• Bookmarking 3 out of 10
  No bookmark manager. No support for Foxmarks. You can import bookmarks, but not export them. Actually, the bookmarking in Chrome is really poor and I think giving it 3 is fair - and that’s mainly for the “accelerated start page”.

So out of 50, I give it 35. I’ll run the same thought process on Opera, Firefox and MSIE over the next few weeks, and so we’ll see how they compare.

Tags: browser wars, Foxmarks, Google Chrome

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:22 pm and is filed under Applications, WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.