Ok, so as most of you know (or may not know) Google recently released their new internet browser called Chrome. Right now, it's only in version 0.2.149.29...so it's not exactly an official release, more of an official preview release. However, it's probably one of the most functional preview releases of a program I have ever used. I have been using it now for about a week and testing it thoroughly in the process to see if it would be a worthy replacement, or at least competitor to the likes of IE8 and Firefox 3. I've compiled a comprehensive, but not too long, list of thing I like and dislike about this browser...

I'll start off with the stuff that I really like since that's the bulk of it. The first thing I noticed as soon as I started up Chrome was that it was really slick. It loads really quickly and it just looks really clean (and I'm running XP SP3, it looks even more clean in Vista SP1). Next is the default home page they give you. The default home page is great, it gives you a list of the 9 most recent websites you have visited, with a thumbnail image of the page just in case you don't recognize the name of the site. to the right of that they offer you a list of the most recent bookmarks you added to your browser. Above that they offer a search bar to search your browser history for a website using an interface that will feel very familiar to anyone who has used either Google Desktop Search or even just plain google.com to search for anything. The thing however, that I really liked was the "Recently Closed Tabs" list below the most recent bookmarks list. This is a wonderful feature. I can't think of how many times I was closing some tabs and accidentally closed the wrong tab only to not remember which one it was I closed on accident. Firefox fixed that with the ctrl-shift-T shortcut that would reopen the last closed tab, but it was a little known shortcut for a while (and still is to some people) and if you closed, say, 5 tabs and tab number 1 was the one you didn't mean to close, then you had to re-open all tabs to find that one you wanted. With this, however, you can just click on it when you open a new tab which is a much needed improvement over the firefox re-open tab feature. So, moving on from the default page, you will notice that the interface has some very intuitive features, like detaching the current tab, all you do is grab the tab and pull it off the tab list release it and it opens in a new window automatically. Similarly, to put a new window into a tab of another window, just grab the tab in the new window and move it to the window you want to attach it to. The next really nice feature I would like to point out is the "new incognito window" option. This opens up a new window that turns off recording of your browser and search history and it doesn't save any of your session cookies either while you're using it. It's not as cool as IE8's security features, but it's pretty cool non-the-less. Aside from those features, there is one under the hood feature I would like to cover as well. Unlike Firefox 3 which opens up new tabs as a thread process within one large main process. Chrome opens each tab you use as a totally new job process as a child of the main process. The advantage to doing this is that if a webpage in a tab causes an error to occur, you will only lose that one tab rather then the entire browser to the crash, if the same thing happened in Firefox, the entire browser requires a restart. So, aside from those things, there are a few minor UI improvements that are obvious right from the start, including some smoother transitions and actions the browser does to make it feel like it's much more well made than a lot of other browsers that seem almost glitchy at times, like when opening new tabs and such.

Continue to page 2 to see what I dislike.