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This Popular Mechanics page about Google Chrome took Google Chrome more than a minute to load. It did offer to release me before eventually bringing in the page.

First reactions: Google's new browser, Chrome, is often fast (but sometimes very slow, as in the screenshot above), it's sketchy, it feels like a first draft of an idea based on a browser. There's no Homepage button, as though mere Web pages were too 20th century.

Chrome downloaded and installed easily enough, and imported my Firefox bookmarks and cookies. But Firefox didn't give up my passwords, so two sites on my personal toolbar that I use all the time didn't know me. Interesting to see what they look like when you don't seem to have an account.

I couldn't figure out at first how to open new tabs (It's a little plus sign to the right of the open tabs), and missed the page and wrench icons in the right corner that both hide and represent, respectively, "Control the current page" (the File menu in Firefox and IE) and "Customize and control Google Chrome" (History, Downloads, and a rudimentary Tools menu).

My personal toolbar was imported, but my real bookmarks were just a folder icon leading to a long dropdown menu, like Firefox's closed tabs list. I keep my long list of bookmarks in Firefox's sidebar, where I can find one at a glance, and two levels of menu sifting won't cut it.

I really missed TabMixPlus and my other Firefox extensions -- including "Undo close tab." Chrome feels like IE, and maybe will offer new worlds of function to IE users. It can't match the custom tool I've created in Firefox for the way I actually browse the Web, though, and I don't have the patience right now to train a new puppy.

After an unfairly brief stab at it, I was tired of it. Trying to close a tab, I accidentally closed the browser. And left it closed.

Your mileage may vary. Here are the first looks of others. They stayed with it longer, and seem to have demanded less of it. All hedge their bets about whether they will use it regularly.

Lurking here is the "feeling-tone" that the world doesn't need another browser, and that, in Chrome, Google (very) simply offers browser features as an interpretation of the Web as operating system; there will be others.

· David Pogue of the New York Times suggests "For now, it's best to think of Chrome as exactly what it purports to be: a promising, modern, streamlined, nonbloated, very secure alternative to today's browsers." Even as he excuses its rudimentary function, Pogue enumerates the ways in which the user no longer controls the surfboard.

From Serious Potential in Google's Browser:

With no status bar, no menu bar and only a single toolbar (for bookmarks), Chrome is minimalist in the extreme.

Some might even call it stripped-down. This initial version is labeled "beta," meaning it is still in testing. True, Google labels almost everything beta -- four-year-old Gmail is still in beta -- but this time it's serious.

At the moment, for example, there's no way to e-mail a Web page to someone, no full-screen mode, no way to magnify the page (rather than just the text), and no bookmarks organizing screen. Google says that these features are at the top of its to-do list.

Chrome is, nonetheless, full of really smart features that seem to have been inspired by other browsers -- or ripped off from them, depending on your level of cynicism...

· The Guardian's Jack Schofield has that level of cynicism, enumerating exactly what Google took from the other browsers (Is there anything original in Google Chrome?). Making Chrome open source was the only way to get away with it. ("I took yours; here, have mine.")

· Google Chrome - Google's new browser - First Look. Jason Clarke at Download Squad.

While the main user interface is sparse, the options panes are even less busy. There are only three tabs of options, and none of them change the user interface in any major way. People that like to tweak the heck out of their browser probably aren't going to be thrilled by the lack of exposed settings.

Commenters here greatly enhance this review with specific likes and dislikes. One noted, "It is amazingly fast, but without all my Firefox extensions, it feels crippled. Since both are open source it shouldn't be too hard to port the extensions; then Chrome will really be a serious contender."

· Google Chrome fast, stable, a bit tricky to use. Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News.

However, I had a hard time figuring out how to do simple tasks like printing in Chrome, found it more difficult to search sites other than Google and was frustrated that I can't yet use it on my Mac at home.

· First Look: Is Google's Chrome a glimpse of the future? Barbara Krasnoff at ComputerWorld.

Chrome's ability to launch a Web-based application in a separate "streamlined" window, devoid of distractions such as address bars and bookmarks, could very well be the advance guard in a push to make all apps Web-based. In other words, try to make the user forget that they are using a browser, at least while they're typing into Google Docs or Gmail.

· Chrome - first impressions. Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC.

Privacy is now a growing concern for many web users, and Chrome has an "Incognito" mode, which means that if your partner comes to the computer after you've been using it, they will not see which sites you have visited.

(Wink, wink. It's porn mode.)

· First look at Google Chrome Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet.

Google Chrome is nice and fast, the download is small, it installs easily and the interface is so simple that it should appeal to novice users yet fully featured enough to appeal to users who demand more from their browser.

Comments -- expanded here -- are snarkier than Download Squad's polite tech reports.

But maybe we're all looking at a new tool on old hardware. At Business Week, Om Malik writes (Google's Browser Puts the Cloud to Work),

As I noted back then, "Things will get more exciting for entrepreneurs when we all start walking around with new Internet-ready portable devices...these pocket-size monsters with keyboards, luscious displays, and brisk 3G connections will soon replace laptops...all they need are browsers that can access Web-based software as easily as your desktop can."

This is what Google has really built here.

I'll try it again when I'm feeling more determined, when Chrome has more function and tweaks available, or when I finally get a readable model of one of those "Internet-ready portable devices."

Fulcrum: First Test of Google's New Browser. WSJ's Walt Mossberg has been trying Chrome for a week alongside IE8. With his usual thoroughness, he lays it all out. What leaps off the screen:

Chrome was designed to be the world's speediest browser at handling JavaScript.

Google's new world of code is built for a JavaScript Web.

Pogue: "Google even went to the trouble of rewriting Javascript, the programming language that underlies many such online programs. According to online Javascript speed tests, Google's version is twice as fast as IE7's."

From Appjet's Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming on the Web,

The Web Programming Era

In the past, programmers wrote code and saved it in text files on their own computers. To share programs with friends, they would have to copy their code to each friend's computer. Nowadays, you can save your code on the web, and to share a program with someone, you just send them a link. We call these programs "web apps", short for web application.

You can learn JavaScript there and build what you want to use:

1. Program right now in your browser: You can edit and run any of the examples directly in your browser. No downloads or software installs, ever.
2. Publish your programs on the web: This guide will teach you how to publish web apps at your own domain name so you can share your creations.
3. All JavaScript: JavaScript is the most prevalent programming language in the world, and AppJet lets you write entire web apps using this single programming language for everything.

That's the idea.

 Tags  browsers Google Chrome

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4 Comments

Karen Anne said:

I tried Chrome, not expecting much, as I have been progressively more disappointed with google (privacy reputation bad, UI work bad, ex: maps, groups.)

In five minutes of using Chrome:

Tabs further away so more mousing required, warning that they still pay no attention to UI.

Plus opens new tab but minus next to it minimizes browser. Sure that's what the minus always does, but they made them look alike, and UI stuff is supposed to be intuitive.

Red warning of close is missing.

A lot of the typein shortcut tricks from firefox are missing.

Why is a site I never heard of in my Recent bookmarks?

Does not fit all my toolbar bookmarks in the visible toolbar, wasted space with white space.

Plus the on the fly language translator gramtrans which I use a lot is not available.

It just looks weird, childlike.

No visible improvements over Firefox.

When I uninstalled it, it brought up IE (ugh) as part of the process when my default browser is firefox.

Okay, I'm done. Firefox can rest easy.

Link | September 3, 2008 8:33 AM
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media kingdom said:

i'm willing to try it out just to see if it works more efficiently than FireFox... if it's faster than Firefox and isn't IE, then i'll use it

Link | September 3, 2008 1:12 PM
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Karen Anne said:

So, a couple of hours after I'd uninstalled Chrome, and rebooted my system, my firewall informed me that google installer was trying to access the Internet. Say what?

I searched for chrome, setting see hidden files and folders, and there are files with that in their name all over the place, but I'm not sure if they are all related to google Chrome.

Link | September 3, 2008 6:23 PM
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Sheila Lennon said:

Karen Anne, search for "GoogleUpdate.exe" and remove it. That's what's calling home.

"Chrome" files control Firefox's user interface. You can edit them.

They're not related to Google's browser.

Link | September 7, 2008 1:44 PM
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