Google Chrome Review: Nothing Special
Today one of my friends told me that he had installed Google Chrome and he’s very satisfied with its speed. I already knew about this browser and that was a chance to try it. I have downloaded and installed Google Chrome for Windows and here are my first impressions.
First of all. you should download a launcher that will download the whole installation package. Seems to be nice for those with a good Internet connection, but… I like to have all my installation packages stored on my hard drive so I could share them with my friends. But that’s Google and I think there are some reasons for such a strategy.
After Google Chrome is downloaded and installed, it will ask you to import your bookmarks and settings from Mozilla Firefox (it’s my main browser). After everything is done, the main window is started and shortcuts are added anywhere it is possible with no option to skip this step. Here is how main window looks:
I have somewhere seen the “Most Visited” panel, didn’t you?
Let’s go further: tab interface does not bring anything new. Tabs are located at the top and I didn’t find any option to move them to any other part. It is not so easy to customize Chrome at the moment, but I think this will be fixed in an official release of this browser.
Pages look very nice, for example, my blog looks like this:
My first impression is that Chrome has too few settings. At the moment it cannot be compared to Opera or Firefox: the number of possible tweaks is significantly lower than in each of these browsers. Here comes the settings window of Chrome:
Usual Firefox settings with Google as default search engine. Nothing interesting and nothing special.
Minor tweaks are too minor: there are just some options that are related to paths and fonts.
Under the hood there are some options too. Too simple settings that could be found in any modern browser.
I used to perform mouse gestures while browsing (thanks to Opera). No plugins for this can be found at the moment and I won’t move to Chrome while this is not possible to do. My password manager completely ignores Google Chrome that’s why I won’t use it until its support is added. About the speed… well, I’ve got a 4096 kbit connection and page load speed is almost the same in all the browsers I have. I think the speed parameter will matter only on a low speed internet and even Opera, whose slogan was “The fastest Browser on Earth”, does not promote it any more: internet became much faster.
I’d like to say that I’ve expected much more from this browser. I’ve found no new features, no plugins and no real advantages, maybe because it’s beta. We’ll be waiting for a complete release. Until then Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer are your friends, if you’re on Windows 
Besides slow work and consumption resources of processors and memory there is no status bar.
Options – minimum, brakes – extreme, even on a computer like my: 2 kernels with 3GHz and 2Gb RAM.
Also, if you work with a local server and in an address bar you type something like “http://somelocalsite” (without a domain name of the first level), GoogleChrome offers variants like “Perhaps you searched http://somelocalsite/?“.
All surfing goes through Google: at first the site is searched in Google data-centers but only then the site is searched in the Internet.
A result:
1. Inadequate consumption of resources;
2. Inconvenience of search;
3. Minimum options;
4. Problems in respect of viewing additional info like status bar;
5. Consumption the traffic;
Conclusion: This browser as is has not presented. GoogleChrome is a utility for surfing on the Internet and, of course, on Google: Google takes the traffic and incomes and we take inconveniences and censored words.
My opinion: It is better let Google todo business it is able to do well, namely search, instead of attempts to climb in those spheres where it has nothing to do, by and large: GoogleChrome is so far from Opera`s (or Mozilla`s) usability / capacity, as to me to have a travel from Moscow to Dublin on foot.