My Thoughts on Chrome

Chrome has been the talk of the town these days after the announcement yesterday. I am very content with my current browser (Safari) and I was a little reluctant to try another browser, but I went ahead and took a leap. I must say, I am impressed. Here are a few thoughts:

First: It is fast as you-know-what. It feels super-responsive, so much so that I first thought it must be a trick. The tabs almost seem to click themselves; the autocomplete is so speedy that I thought it was reading my mind. After download and launch, it pulled in not only my bookmarks but, apparently, also my Awesome Bar history. Once I loaded it up and typed "T," Twitter.com was almost already loaded in the tab. It was slightly terrifying, actually. One note: Chrome did not import my Firefox Live Bookmarks--the RSS feeds that appear in a drop-down from the menu bar, and it sadly doesn't have this as a feature at all.

Secondly: The "tabs-on-top" interface is actually a tiny bit off-putting at first. I'm so used to tabs being below the URL bar that I initially felt confused about which ones I had opened. Also, there are no traditional menus for...well, anything. There's almost no text whatsoever at the top of the browser window. No File, Edit, View, Tools, etc. You've got a wrench for the very minimal selection of customization settings and a button to the left of that where you access the menu items you normally find in "File," "Edit," and "Tools," along with a Developer option where you'll find Chrome's Windows-style Task manager.

So, those are just a few thoughts. I like where Chrome is going. It is not the most beautiful browser in the market, but it sure gets the job done - quickly at that. There are many betas to follow and probably many features to be added so it is not the end for this browser. I think I'll go back to Safari in the meantime though.