Google Chrome Review

First impressions suggest that Google Chrome is quite an impressive browser, but after longer term use, it seems like an unfinished, 80% complete project.

Advantages of Google Chrome:

1. Much faster! Way faster than IE and a little faster than Firefox
2. It doesn’t crash as much and if a tab does crash, only the one tab closes. Any other open tabs and windows remain independently
3. The find box is unintrusive- better than it floating around cluttering the screen like on IE and Firefox
4. Convenient quick search feature- you can select any text and right-clicking gives the option to search the keyword(s) in new tab
5. It shows your most visited websites on the homepage – great!
6. If you accidentally close a tab, it’s no problem. Simply go to the home page and it will show ‘recently closed tabs’ – a very nice feature
7. Easy keyword searching of history
8. You can right-click on the tab and duplicate the page
9. Lightweight and reduced clutter at the top of browser

Drawbacks of Google Chrome

1. It doesn’t work properly with many websites- perhaps not rendering ajax or javascript correctly.
   1. For example, omnis.com it doesn’t let you buy a domain name. I’m unable to submit a timesheet for payroll on the ADP website.

   2. Microsoft doesn’t work, no MSN or passport login, for example you can’t get into microsoft adcenter.
   3. On godaddy.com, it showed a half-blank page, missing the normal navigation and with completely messed up formatting- something that would show fine in IE and Firefox.
   4. On istockphoto, it didn’t let Chrome users buy anything (this may have been fixed by now).
   5. Online demos might not be supported. For example, an interspire email marketer demo didn’t work. It said “Your browser doesn’t support html editing. Try Firefox.”
   6. Google Chrome doesn’t work well with SalesForce either. If you try to create a view and edit pick list, for example, it will block picklist popups.
   7. It doesn’t work well with WordPress either. Some of the features are unusable and the rendering of the page is different in Google Chrome.
2. HTML rendering is different than IE and Firefox and a little messed up in some cases. For example, text inside paragraph tags won’t always wrap around floated images. I’ve had to swap many of my P tags for BR tags
3. Some css styles don’t function the same like in IE or Firefox
4. Popups are blocked without any noticeable indication. It can make it seem like a website is not working.
5. Links from emails don’t always open up a tab in the browser. It will sometimes do nothing.
6. If you ask browser to remember your password, then enter it wrong, it will continue to remember and autofill the wrong password everytime you come across that site. There’s no way to remove it without deleting all of your other stored ‘remembered’ passwords. The very convenient feature turned very inconvenient.
7. It chokes on PDFs. The entire Google Chrome may crash trying to open some PDF files.
8. Printing features are not as good as in IE. In IE, you can right-click, choose print, and just print the selection. There’s no option for printing text selections in Chrome. It’s an inconvenience, as some webpages contain a lot of distracting graphics and it’s nice to simply print a text selection.
9. Printing a regular page isn’t as convenient- it’s buried under a drop down menu on the top right under a document icon.
10. Copying images from a website and trying to paste into another application usually doesn’t work
11. Selecting and copying text from a website doesn’t always work either- it won’t always save into the clipboard

    It’s really unfortunate this potential Internet Explorer and Firefox killer stopped short of it’s potential. Some might still find this fast, lightweight browser is still better than IE for general use, but being incompatible with so many websites is really a downer. Maybe their next version will be “the one”…