Kokul’s World

Verdict: Google Chrome is a surefire winner in the browser market.

The Good: Small, fast, secure with a clean, intuitive interface.

The Bad: Not enough customization options available in terms of themes, addons, and extensions.

Google released their web browser not so long ago into a market already dominated by the likes of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. However, coming from a search and web giant, this browser definetely has the power to gain a solid foot hold. Google released this browser with the intent to improve the average user’s everyday web experience, fixing things that their engineers felt that other browsers felt lacking. After all, who else spends more time on the web than Google employees?

When you first boot up the browser, what you instantly notice is the clean browser interface. There is no splash screen, no loading bars, no pop-ups, prompts, etc. It just opens up and shows the initial start page. No hassles, no crying, no confusion. Unlike other web browsers, Chrome has only the most necessary and frequently used buttons in browsing: Back, Forward, Home, Refresh and the Favourites. Everything else has been shuffled into menus that take a page from Windows Live Messenger’s book. Two buttons on the right hand side are used to access menus where everything else like settings and history are stored. While this may seem like a nuisance since one will have to go through menus to access certain things, you find that you only need those menus perhaps once a day or once a session. Everything else you need is in the simplified toolbar. The URL address bar has also been greatly simplified and easier to use. Like Firefox, typing in URL or Web Page names brings up a list of recently visited pages from the history. Also, the URL bar acts as a search box which returns results from the Google search engine.

When you open a new tab or boot up Chrome, you get greeted with its start page. The start page lists your 6 most frequently visited websites, showing thumbnails of them that you can click on that will take you there instantly. Quite handy, since it reduces the amount of typing one has to do, and the number of URLs one has to memorize. The page also lists recent bookmarks, a search box to search your history from, and a link to show your full history.

Security in Chrome is pretty solid. Vulnerabilities are kept to a minimum using updates, with each tab and plugin held in a separate process to prevent one tab or plugin from sniffing credit information and personal information from other tabs or plugins. This type of isolation also prevents the entire browser from crashing if a plugin or tab crashes, preserving your entire web session. As of yet, there are no major reported vulnerabilities, making it pretty safe for banking and other matters that require personal or credit information.

One of the things that Google has kept in mind with this browser is Web standards. One notices that HTML and CSS render smoothly, cleanly, and more importantly unlike its Microsoft counterpart, correctly. Web pages that work in any other browser work in Chrome. This means that new adopters will not have to worry about their favourite sites loading and displaying properly. Of course, new adopters can also bring in bookmarks from other browsers into Chrome.

The one thing you notice when you open up the options page is Google’s commitment to make it a easy to use, simple, works out of the box solution to your web browsing needs. There are not a million dazzling options to scare the average user away. The only options available are ones that need to exist. Like where to place downloads by default, and some other minor tweaks all related to one’s web browsing experience. There is no need to tinker with settings to get it to work with your internet connection, etc.

Of course, with such simplicity comes some grief. Customization is sadly lacking, which I suppose is a small price to pay for usability and simplicity. There is currently no way to change its look and feel with themes or skins, but I suppose they may just interfere with the interface’s simplicity. There are no add-ons or extensions available to change your browsing experience although it may be possible that Google deemed these to reduce the stability of the browser or make it more insecure. Although it is true that extensions may weigh down the browser, making it more sluggish.

Overall though, this browser is certainly a keeper and may find a fairly large market for itself among the everday web surfer. Whether more advanced computer users will pick up on the browser and use it is still yet to be seen. But Google is far from done working on this browser.