Though ‘m a end user of Microsoft products, ‘m never a fan of Internet Explorer. I’ve always been looking around for browsers with tabbed interfaces and faster rendering of web pages, and Opera and Firefox suited my needs. Lately, ‘ve been using Firefox and Flock web browsers, and ‘m liking both in spite of them having a couple of disadvantages (heh, kinda’ trivial problems: not able to perform certain online banking transactions). Firefox and Flock offer the same functionality, fast rendering and flexibility, but I find them a tad heavy on my system when I open a lot of tabs. I’ve IE 7 on my computer, and ‘ve never trusted it for some heavy-duty work involving a lot of tabs - it just crashes on me asking me to ‘restart’ the browser; huh, pain in the wrong place.

Just a few hours ago, Google launched its web browser - Chrome, which I eagerly downloaded and installed. The installation took quite sometime unlike Firefox/Flock, but it was clean and efficient with the final screen asking for ‘import’ from my Firefox browser (default browser at the time of Chrome installation). Ah, well, the installation completed, bookmarks and settings were imported from Firefox, and the Chrome browser finally opened (or rather unfolded?) - smooth as silk, minimal and FAST.

The first thing I noticed is the obviously missing title bar; you’ll just see the tab bar - innovatively placed on the top most area of the window. I personally liked the disappearance of the title bar (I never pay attention to the title bar when opening a web page. Do you?) and navigation menu bar that were eating up most of the window space on my 15-inch notebook screen.

The menu (controls and customization) placement is just below the ‘minimize’/'maximize’ window buttons, and the letters are clear and uncluttered and the wordings intuitive - just like Firefox/Flock. If you have used Flock, there is this ’star’ icon, which when clicked bookmarks that web page - ‘m happy to see this feature in Chrome. The ‘control’ menu gave me a surprise when I clicked on it - there’s this ‘New Incognito Window‘ option that opens as a new window. The window comes up with a message tip that reads “You’ve gone incognito. Pages you view in this window 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. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however.”

Well, one doesn’t have to clear cookies and cache after making an online transaction or after visiting sensual websites.

The status bar is also missing, saving my screen space again. Yet again, Google is Google - when you click on a link or open a new page, you still see the small bluish status bar that appears and vanishes between your clicking or hitting enter and the web page loading completely. I would suggest that Google uses a higher contrast for the status mini-bar, as I had problems reading the text (‘m not dyslexic)

The address bar doubles as search bar, and gives you sensible options before you complete typing the words or hit enter. The search and suggestions feature is just too fast that you won’t realize that it is searching your history pages and the internet simultaneously.

After all of the above experimentation, I clicked on ctrl-N (or ctrl-T), and behold - I see a thumbnail collection of the most recently viewed web pages. Nice thinking folks!

It’s been just two hours of me using Google Chrome, and it has already become my default browser. I’m still to explore certain web sites that are pro-IE. Nevertheless, ‘m pretty sure that Google has tried to give us the best of all worlds - IE, Mozilla, AppleWebKit and Safari. Although Chrome will see Firefox as the major competitor, I can already see hard times for Microsoft IE coming along.

Bugs: I just found one bug, but don’t know whether it is restricted to my notebook PC. The touch pad page scroll (up/down) works only one-way - I can scroll down, but not up. Also, the scroll down speed is just too high! I don’t have this problem with Firefox, Flock or IE. However, the page scroll works perfectly if I use a mouse instead of the touch-pad.

The browser crashed a couple of times already, but in my opinion this is perfectly normal for any new software that is just out of the box.

Overall rating of Chrome: 8/10. Deducted 2 points for the scroll bug and for crashing twice while I was making this the default browser.