Google Chrome – worth using?

Anyone use it?

What does it do better?

I’ve been wondering this too…..thinking of installing it.

There’s quite a lot of info on the Google Chrome site.

As far as I can work out:

– when you open a new tab you get a load of thumbnails of recently opened pages you can click on to go to where you want quickly.
– the address bar is also a search window, but you don’t have to leave it as Google by default if you don’t want to.
– You can drag tabs out of your current window and into a new one.
– each tab opens a new application, so if one window crashes, youcan shut that one down and you don’t lose all the other tabs you were browsing. Which is to me the main advantage over IE.
– you can open an ‘incognito’ page or something, where no history is saved on your computer (p0rn surf page, I guess).

I use it over Firefox most of the time now.

It’s really fast at starting up and it has a cool homepage which has links to your most visited sites. Apart from that I can’t think of anything it does better, but give it a try!

Oh, and it does have an “incognito mode” where anything you look up doesn’t leave any traces in your history or cookies. Can’t think what you’d use it for though 😉

I moved from IE7 and as such I adore Chrome.

More stable, each tab = separate process, most viewed sites on home page, remembers open sites when you shut down etc etc….and its fast, and just works!

I believe many of the feature I now ‘couldn’t live without’ are available in Firefox – so if you’re moving from Firefox to Chrome it may not be as impressive.

Right….I think i am convinced and will download it at some suitable point today.

That was another thing I forgot in my first post. As allyharp say, it’s s’posed to run faster than IE.
I have only ever used IE, so I suspect I will be pleasantly suprised!

I use it too, there’s a bit of scare mongery about what it does in the background, such as reporting to google what you’ve been up to so they can be specific with their advertising. But, it does show you your most popular 9 pages every time you open a new tab. Also, if you open an ‘incognito window’ you can view porn and not worry about deleting cookies as it won’t save any! 😉

I switched to Firefox from IE but now find it very slow to start up. Chrome is quicker to start

Are there any extensions like Adblock Plus or Noscript for it yet/on the way? I tried it and liked but not having ABP/NS meant that i soon reverted to Firefox.

I liked Chrome but the lack of flash ad blocker like in firefox means I havent really adopted it – draws too much attention to STW when at work without the flasj blocker with the adds on the right!

I prefer Firefox but use Chrome because it is so much faster. It’s not just starting up which is faster, but all round use just seems to turbo-charge the internet on most of the computers I use.
It’s far from reliable though and there are a lot of bugs, some of which means I’ll often resort back to Firefox for some things.

Oh, and it does have an “incognito mode”

haven’t you seen the “enhanced accounts” they’re selling to women throughout the land – total access to all histories & control over search returns ?

I’d use Chrome if it had the add-ons which have been developed for Firefox. Some of these are coming.

it also has a custom JavaScript engine which runs things like gmail + google maps a lot smoother than IE or Firefox, though Safari 4 should be even better. 8)

Is it better than Safari 4? Quite a lot of those features sound like what I’ve been using on my macBook for the last couple of months.

I liked it but it had issues on some sites (STW being one) with things like the buttons above this box and stupid losses of caret.

i like it, use it on PC. most useful feature for me is searching from the address bar.

safari 4 on the mac is nearly as good but once chrome is out for mac then i’ll switch.

I’ve had a quick look but I decided to stick with Opera

i have been using it for the last week, i like it. it is definitely faster than IE and sfari (which i stopped using because it crashed so often) on my computers.

I’ve had a look but I’m wedded to a couple of ad ons like Noscript and something which you’re not allowed to mention on here

I use it for general browsing but find a work related things (java-based) don’t work properly so revert to IE7 for those.

Super stable, and when it does crash, when you restart it you can open it to exactly the pages you were on. Much faster than IE 7. Looks nicer. I like the most visited thing too.

I have not long downloaded it, first thing I noticed is, that its soooo much quicker than IE…

People are still using IE7? 😯

Chrome is not bad, but I prefer Firefox as I make pretty heavy use of the add-ons (especially ABP, GreaseMonkey and Firebug)

using it now
fast, hasnt crashed.

erm….just tried to install it and it restarted my computer right at the start of the install – not a good sign. Probably won’t try again until I can do some searching into possible causes.
I am sure I read somewhere compatibility problems with Symantec – that’s Norton and stuff isn’t it? I’m running Norton on mine…..

Google Chrome – so far, 0/10.

It isn’t as usable as Firefox yet & [as already mentioned] lacks some required addons
Firefox with a few essential addons & FineTune is still the one to beat for my money

Problem is almost certainly Norton – it’s much worse for your computer than any virus could ever be. 😉

I’m on Safari 4 on mac which has the most visited sites thing and seems super fast to me. No Mac version of Chrome yet anyway

I took the plunge and removed Firefox from both my laptop and my main desktop and now use Chrome instead. Mind you, there are still some things I need to use IE for, mostly work bits, but I guess they will work in time.

I find it is faster, more reliable and does not freeze as much for no reason.

Mind you, there are still some things I need to use IE for, mostly work bits, but I guess they will work in time.

Probably not actually. If they rely on embedded ActiveX controls and the like then it is unlikely that they will work on any browser except IE as they are a massive security problem. If they are just badly written web pages then they may get fixed but most companies take the line that “our official browser is IE”.

Futurmark has released an online Benchmark for the browsers:
http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/

Everyone own one but only a few does know why to use a different browser.
Considere a browser like a car, some cars are slow, some cars are unsecure, some cars pollute more than others, some cars are cute etc etc.
The choice of a browser may radicaly change your web experience, confort and at the same time indirectly (but directly) affects how does the standard are applied by web devellopers today and tomorow.

You will find a little browser comparaison, including performance and standard capabilities.
A perfect browser in the form would pass all the test while having a nice performance, but it may lack in other points like user-friendly interface, stability, security and more, which aren’t reviewed in this comparaison.

Performance is how fast the browser does render the elements of a webpage, but fast doesn’t mean correctly neither securly.
Acid1, 2 and 3 are the standard capabilities of the browser, the more it pass the test the more it render complex scripting page correctly and respects standard.

Acid1 test is available here:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS1/current/test5526c.htm

Acid2 test is available here:
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html

Acid3 test is available here:
http://acid3.acidtests.org

All the browsers were tested on the same machine with the same environement.
Windows XP Proffesionnal 32b, Intel Q9650, 4 Gb.
The same test has been done on Windows 7 64 Bits, the results are very the same even for IE 8.0 64 Bits.
Konqueror has been tested on Mandriva 2009 x64 and Epiphany on Linux Mint 6 x64.

If you plan on changing your browser (IE users maybe) you can find the alternative browsers here, all of them are free of charge:
Opera http://www.opera.com/browser/
Safari http://www.apple.com/safari/
Chrome http://www.google.com/chrome/
Firefox http://www.firefox.com
IE 8.0 http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/beta/

The second graph adds a couple of other browsers that you can find here:
SeaMonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org
LunaScape http://www.lunascape.tv
Konqueror http://www.konqueror.org
Epiphany http://projects.gnome.org/epiphany/

For information, on this forum the browsers usage is the following:
IE 54%
Firefox 37%
Opera 6%
Chrome 2%
Safari 1%

Keep the web clean, drive safely.
Enjoy.

Miniclip games don’t play in Chrome

🙁