Right well, further to this post I've now downloaded the eagerly anticipated Google Chrome and had a bit of a play on it.
First impression: very impressed.
Let's put aside the concerns around privacy that we all have (omnibar is ace, but what's it sending and where?) mainly because I don't know enough about it to argue a point. I'm looking at this thing from two angles; 1. as a designer and 2. as a layman user. And on both counts it seems to come out on top.
Ok so what do I like?
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Omnibar - a bit like Firefox 3's "Awesome Bar" but on steroids. Great bit of kit. Allows you to instantly search for anything directly from your address bar. Ok, this has been around a while not not as elegantly as this. Really really good, expecially if you had the classic Google search page as your homepage. Bye bye.
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New tab - this will probably end up being alot of users' preference for their homepage setup. It shows your most recently bookmarked pages, the most frequently visited page and also the last set of tabs closed. Great stuff, and because you can search directly from the Omnibar it serves alot of purposes. Impressive from a user point of view.
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Performance - I was impressed by this alot, I was curious as to how the new tab = new process setup would work out and it does seem to workout just fine. To be fair, I've good connection to the net at home and don't really struggle to open pages anyway. But I guess time will tell with this, especially for those people who use web apps more and more such as Google Docs etc.
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The source viewer is a good rig, it opens the page source in a new tab and it looks fresh and clean. But this feature is massively enhanced byt the "Inspect Element" feature. For those of us who use FF "View Selection Source" it's a fancier, awseome(r) version of that. It opens up what looks like a source editor and displays the elements of the page in a collapsable format, like a proper source editor does, and also when you select a particular element in the source it highlights it on the page in a fancy yellow colour. Lovely job!
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Standard compliance - hmmmm it seems to render things like FF doesand not IE which can only be good news. I tested a few IE hacks out on it to see if it was affected by them and it wasn't, unless I missed something!
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Downloads - much like the setup in FF but done very very elegantly. I likes.
A couple of annoyances but literally tiny things:
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Home button is missing when you first setup the browser. Not a problem because you can add it via the options menu but for people not as well versed in this sort of thing it could be a small pain. That said, those people in that category are probably not gonna be moving from IE anytime soon anyway.
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jQuery round corners causes the same black corners that it causes in Safari. Not a problem really, just something that you'll notice if you're viewing my blog in Safari or Chrome. Must get round to fixing that. EDIT - Fixed thanks to the
newest version of the .js file.
I'm sure that people who are far better versed than me in browser design and development will have strong view on the browser, but this is just what I think!
So, a very quick review of a very big application. But my first impressions are that of a very solid browser that does what you expect it to. And it didn't crash once.
Will I be moving from Firefox 3 though?
Maybe later.