I first heard about Chrome this morning from a friend whose wife works with Google on this Chrome project. Indeed, I went to the website right away to check it out and I was blown away by what I read about it. If you want to read more about it, I recommend the Google Chrome comic strip that they put out on their website. I must warn you, unless you are into development stuff, the comic is pretty darn boring.
My first impressions of Google Chrome? Wow, this thing is speedy! It feels a lot snappier than the Firefox browser, however, I am unsure if it loads any faster upon Windows start up. I’ll have to see about that. Of course, since Google Chrome utilizes multiple processes greatly, it really takes advantage of the quad-core processor I have. If you have a multi-core processor, expect an increase in response with this new browser!
The next thing I appreciate about this browser out of the box is that it maximizes your screen real-estate. It has removed all the borders and minimized all that garbage you commonly see at the top of the browser. In addition to the screen space is the ability to search with the address bar. You set your default browser and just need to type whatever you want to search into the address bar box. Of course, if you’re typing in google.com, you will go to the domain itself. However, if it is just a keyword, it defaults to a search as opposed to trying to resolve into a domain in Firefox or IE (correct me if I’m wrong).
Google Chrome also does DNS prefetching! This reduces the time it takes to resolve a domain to an IP for the browser to go to. It may be just me, this makes it much faster than the traditional DNS lookup done by other browsers. With this browser, you can now click and drag a tab out of its window and it will become another window! HUH? So, if you have a browser window with two tabs, you can now click on one drag it out of the window and it becomes another window itself!
There are a few things I dislike about this browser, but that is for another post. I think that Google Chrome will definitely play an important role in the future development of web browsers. Of course, the marketshare that Google Chrome is likely to split with are the Firefox folks. We shall see how the crowd reacts with Google’s jump into another arena of competition.
