Google Chrome Logo

Google Chrome logo image via Google

A new browser just established itself yesterday and joined the Browser war against other well known browser such as Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Apparently Google has a lot of confindence in them and launched their own browser called Google Chrome on September 2nd, 2008. It’s still currently in Beta stage so a lot of bugs are to be expected, however, the future looks promising from user feedbacks that I read on various forums.

Google introduced a minimal design combined with faster,safer and easier browsing experience within Google Chrome. I downloaded it today and posted this post using Google Chrome. My impression so far is that it’s faster than firefox 3 when loading pages especially pages with a lot of images and I also felt that it’s smoother than FF3.

Memory Usage

One noticable bug that I found right away is the number of processes it creates. Everytime, you create a new tab, Chrome will add another processes on your system. To check this bug, you need to Ctrl-Alt-Del and click on Processes tab. Sort the name in ascending order and you will notice a lot of Chrome processes which adds your memory usage.

I had 13 tabs opened at the same time and each of them created its own process. The total memory usage for those processes is 298,744 KB (298 MB). This problem obviously creates a huge burden for those with limited RAM (Less than 1 GB) on their system but I am sure they are working on to fix it because after all, it’s still only a beta ^^.

Import Feature

Changing into Google Chrome is probably the smoothiest transition that I have ever had. It imports not only settings but all your saved passwords and bookmarks during the installation process. Not to mention, Google Chrome put the bookmark list on the top-right side so it reduces the chance of blocking whatever on your browser at that time.

Bookmarks

What is even better is that Chrome also imports your page history so anything pages that you have visited on your previous will be listed under Google Chrome page history.

 

Page History

To stay within the concept of minimalistic, Chrome does not have a lot settings under ‘Options’ but it’s enough to cover the basic. Under Basics option, one feature that I really like is Chrome lets you decide on what pages it will open during startup so you can add as many as you want ^^.     

basicoption

The next tab is Minor Tweaks which contains download location, passwords management and fonts/languages. One feature that I really like from FF and Chrome does not have is Master Password function. It protects your saved password by adding a security password to view those passwords so no one can easily take a look at your password on your system. On Chrome, you or anyone else can easily view saved passwords on a particular computer.

minortweaks

The last tab is Under the Hood and it contains General, Network, Web Content and Security settings which all are pretty similar to what other browser has.

underthehood

So far, I like Google Chrome and I think it has a lot pontentials to compete with other browsers. The emergence of Google Chrome should be greatly applaud by users like us because by having more competitors, other browsers are forced to release a better version of their products in the future in order to gain more browser usage. I hate to admit it but what my friend told last week was correct. He said
as iron sharpens iron, so one browser sharpens another
Â