Tried Google Chrome yet?

Google has revolutionized search, and made the email client seem rather unwieldy and unnecessary, but there they have been wide of the mark on a few things.

Google Desktop wasn't very good in the early days. It started out seeming a bit slow and a bit intrusive, both in terms of system resource usage and privacy.

However, I downloaded the latest enterprise version at my workplace, with a private encrypted index and support for Lotus Notes search and I was very impressed. Admittedly, the index got corrupted once and had to be rebuilt, but it has made things easy to find. This is very important when you have one hand on the phone and only one on the keyboard ;-)



So, I approached Google Chrome with some interest. I say some, because I'm not really in the market for a new browser. I love both Firefox and Opera and I can't see how much improvement can be made in this area. However, Google claimed that their browser would have a small memory footprint and wouldn't leak memory either. This sounded tempting because Firefox 3 has only improved on Firefox's tendency to hemorrhage tens of megabytes of lovely memory by a small amount. Opera leaks too, but less so. In addition to this, Google claimed that their new browser was going to be optimized for web applications, especially for gmail. This sounded good, so I decided to give it a whirl.

I was whelmed.

It's not all that special from what I've seen so far. It doesn't suck, but it doesn't blow me away, either. I've used gmail in it - it's OK I suppose, but it hardly seems all that "optimized". What's the difference between it's layout in web application mode than just hitting F11 in FF, Opera or IE? It loads quickly, sure, but then so does FF3 with no plugins. So does IE7 for that matter, but that's a steaming puddle of horse pish. The history search is nice, as you'd expect from Google, but searching your bookmarks and history in FF works well enough for me.

Remember Seamonkey? I still use it quite a bit, mainly because it reminds me of classic Mozilla - my second browser love, after Netscape. Flock has a Photobucket edition, but that's no big deal. Most people have never used Flock or Seamonkey, and never will. Chrome will have to really stand out to have any chance of making a dent in the established browser user base* - the trouble is, I'm still just not sure what makes Chrome so special.

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Read this superb review at InfoQ

* I saw a BBC News report this week that stated that IE still holds 80% of the browser market