Google's Chrome

I believe I was the first to download this, because I was refreshing about every 5 minutes or so (by hand). I guess it would have been easier to do it in opera and tell it to refresh ever minute or whatever. Anyhow, I got it at 2:48pm EST. Here are my impressions.

Pros:

• Start up is faster than I thought. The comic said initial startup would be slow.
• Rendering is ultrafast, FF should integrate Webkit.
• Interface is somewhat pretty, very minimalist.
• Porn mode even blocks Google spying (more on this in the cons) it seems.
• Open Source, although it is a humongous code base
• Better resource handling sort of...  Trading in memory fragmenting for a bunch of processes.
• Check out the "Inspect Element" on the context menu, it is like a stripped down Firebug.

Neutral:

• The "Create Application" shortcut is just about useless to me, bookmark does it good enough

Cons:

• Not keyboard friendly (can not access the menus with the alt key)
• No ad blocking, but I am sure that will come with a plugin or modified source.
• The changing of the fonts is a bit buggy. You change the size of the Serif fonts the other to change also, font family change does exhibit this behavior.
• The never crash claim isn't all the great because FF has yet to crash on me, but I do get the memory fragmentation.
• I like how in FF you can highlight a link in the "Awesome" Bar and delete it, this is not in Chrome.
• The options dialog loads slowly and when it is loaded it works slow also.
• As I type this the Ctrl+B is clashing with a accelerator in Chrome.
• Also, as I was typing this blog, I surfed to activision.com in another tab and Chrome hung for about 15 seconds. I have only produced this once, but there is low framerate on activision.com.

Now here is where it gets really bad

• Seemingly, maybe it was in the comic, but I hate that everytime you type in the address bar it makes a connection to Google. Just search the local history and steal my data when I close the browser ;-) I mean ;-(
• It installs to the under the users "Local Settings" directory. WTF! Why can't I install to another drive? This is very dumb, but I guess it is expected because Google Desktop installs on the windows drive also. Google you really need to give us an option on where to install

Overall, I do like it and I think I will be keeping it due to the fact it renders so quickly and I will probably uninstall Opera. I am sure the next release will fix some of these issues, and put it closer to FF, but for now FF has nothing to worry about and IE is still safe also. Opera's last leg just broke for me, because I was using it only to browse dzone.com basically.