Tech Burn

Google has released its eagerly awaited browser named ‘Chrome’. The browser although still in its ‘beta’ stage of development is very much stable. The installation was pretty straight forward. Go to google.com/chrome and download the setup file which is about 475KB. Run the setup file, installation took about 20 seconds. All the bookmarks, passwords were imported from my default browser Mozilla Firefox. So in about a min (if your quick) your all set to play with the Google Chrome.

The first thing I noticed was the Chrome was much quicker than most browsers out there. Most of the sites I browsed looked normal and loaded quick. Flash pages load without any issues, there is no need to reinstall / update flash.

Home page is filled with thumbnails of the most visited websites. There is also a Search box on the homepage to search history. There is a link at the bottom which shows the full history, date and timewise. Bookmarks are placed on top of the home screen for easy access.

The tabs are placed on top of the window followed by the back, forward and the refresh button below. Next feature that is worth a mention is the all-in-one text box to search using your favorite search engine, web history and it serves as the normal address bar too. You get suggestions related to your keywords as you type. A great feature, the all in one integration makes it easier to search and browse.

Everytime you click on New tab, the home page is diplayed. There isnt really a way to change this as of now.

The drag tab feature works great. You can easily drag a tab outside the browser which would create a new window. Extremely simple move – manage tabs. I usually end up with a lot of tabs and at times feel the need to organise / move a few of them into seperate windows.

The major issue I had with Google Chrome is with their new feature called Crash Control which turns out to be quite RAM intensive. What it basically does is, create a new process for each tab you open. With 11 tabs open there were 13 processes (2 for the application, 11 for the tabs) and approximately 260 MB of RAM was consumed!! Firefox in comparison ate up just 82 MB for 11 tabs. Google Chrome strictly isnt for users with less than 1GB of RAM if your on Windows XP.

With Google Chrome you can create bookmarks instantly. Just click on the star button and your page is bookmarked! One feature that could help Google to pull some crowd to use their browser is the Incognito Mode also known as Private Browsing. Here is Google’s description of the feature “Pages you view in this window (while in Incognito mode) won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. However, any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved.” One of the best features in Chrome. Unique and most useful.

Moving on we have the much simpler Download Manager. Hate the download window that pops up everytime you download something? Google Chrome’s non-intrusive Download manager just displays the status at the bottom of the window.

Task Manager is great. It shows memory, network and CPU usage of each tab and plugin. You can end each process; very similar to the Windows Task Manager.

Overall a great start by Google. For a beta it works great. The Incognito Mode, drag tab and download manager are the best unique features to have come out of Google Chrome. The cons are the appplication is very RAM intensive, so its not for users with less than 1 GB of memory on Windows XP and minimum 2 GB on Windows Vista.

Below are some screenshots of the browser. Check them out.

How do you like Google’s all new Browser Chrome? Leave a comment below.