Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Chroming with Google's Chrome, my impressions

After chroming around with Google''s new Chrome browser for a few hours and I gotta admit, my head is spinning a bit...
  1. It looks too much like Vista on XP, wrong..
  2. It's fast, super fast, but Firefox 3 still ain't too shabby, 
  3. Tab's on top annoy me, scanning over my address bar and bookmark icons each time, and it means to much mouse movement compared to them FF3 style.
  4. As an IE user it would be more exciting, but I am now used to FF3
  5. The new tab start page is very cool..
  6. A problem for developers might be that some things run differently speed wise and might fall over as a result, just like with QBASIC back in the dos days.
  7. Microsoft must be really, really worried to be thinking anti-trust
  8. What will the corporates think IE6 is getting crufty....
  9. Remember, this is only the first beta
Honest have I spent a lot of time with FF and I like the 'weight' of it's browser chrome. I know where the page ends and the browser starts. IE7 & IE8 look distinctly like they couldn't decide what to do with the browser asthetically.  Safari feels wrong to me, it's too light.

Consider holding a piece of 70gsm paper in your hand to read, and then taking some 180gsm paper, what feels nicer? for my tastes i like the solid feel.

I'm still waiting for someone to revolutionise the UI for these wide screens displays, asthetically I prefer full screen windows, it's less noisy.  There is usually whitespace either side of a page, but even the changes with Chrome, it fails to use that space and instead persists with gobbling up valuble vertical space.

even thinking about the word Sidebar give me shivers.. 


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Did you notice that Chrome didn't ask where you'd like to install it? It in fact installs into your Windows profile - c:\documents and settings\Your Name\etc. Corporate IT departments will hate that (bloating up roaming profiles by up to 100MB).

The javascript/DOM console is VERY cpu intensive. Just having it open consumed 50% of my quad core processor. I was alerted to that by the increased fan noise!

Also the scrolling is jerky with no option to smooth it. But as you said, it's just a beta. A bit like GMail is just a beta... as it has been for the past 4 years! ;-)

Gary F.