B Computing Blog

Its been a while since my last entry, but i come back with big news, Google Chrome.

Just in case people hadn’t heard, Google’s new and very anticipated web browser has now been released. And on first impression’s, is immensely fast!

For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a screenshot:

Google Chrome Web Browser

As you can see, very simple and minimalistic, as all things modern are, but under the surface it is just as full and useful as other browsers.

Chrome uses Apple’s WebKit HTML rendering engine which was used for Apple’s Safari, and also, is a BETA release, so bugs are to be expected. Googles main aim for this browser was stability, and to prevent crashes caused by one tab to close the whole browser, so to solve it, they have created every tab as a separate process, the effect this will have on your RAM when you’ve got 20 tabs open it to be seen but i cant imagine it been good, i may be wrong.

With Google Chrome been a newbie to the browser industry, it comes without what has, in my opinion, made FireFox what it is today, and what has made it so popular between bloggers, webmasters and the like, and that is a full library of software add-ons and extensions. But, Google have announced that Chrome will be releases under an Open Source License, and if it does so, it will gain that in a very short space of time.

As mentioned at the beginning, it is immensely fast, installing, starting up, using, is faster than FireFox and IE on the computer I installed it on. While testing it, I also was unable to crash it, which is usually not too hard in web browsers, and opening plenty of tabs, each with plenty of content to load simultaneously, still didn’t slow it down to a point where you would notice, that goes for both the web browser and the computer.

A feature which I really liked was the way it handled downloads, it doesn’t use up another window to show you the downloads, it shows the progress of each download underneath each tab and to look at them all, you can use the ‘Show All Downloads’ button which shows you them all on one unified tab, no extra windows.

A great feature which Chrome comes with is an ‘Incognito Mode’. You can right click a URL and select it to open in ‘Incognito Mode’ and it is effectively the same as opening the web page in another instance of the browser, with cleared cookies, and when the incognito window is closed, it clears the cookies and history for the browsing period in the incognito window.

When installing it also asks if you want it to import all your settings etc from your current default browser and place them in Chrome for you, quite handy for all those Bookmarks i suppose.

A feature that i quite like, and what i think will be quite handy, is that Chrome has its own ‘Task Manger’, by this i mean you can press ‘Shift + ESC’ and it will bring up a little window which shows you all the tabs that you have open and how much memory and CPU usage each i using, and, with each tab been a seperate process, it means if you have a tab which has crashed, you can end that, rather than the whole browser, very handy in my opinion.

In a nutshell, Google Chrome is prodigious web browser and, if it gets the same amount of software add-ons and extensions, then it has the capability to wipe out FireFox and other browsers. What makes this even more of an achievement for Google, is the fact that this is a BETA version and it is a very usable browser.

BUT, don’t take our word for it, here’s the link, and at only 7.3MB its worth a try - Google Chrome.

Until next time…happy browsing!

B Computing.