Google Chrome Released

Here it is, the browser made by the guys at Google. First things first, and a thank you to Pedro Sousa is due for having brought this to my attention as I had no idea that Google was even working on their own browser.

To be honest, I have been trying Google Chrome for a few minutes now and I was very impressed. It looked like and improved Firefox but now I’ve just logged into my blog and the rust started to show. Basically, in the admin panel of wordpress, everything is out of place and a real mess. Who is to blame? I have no clue. But all of this worked on Firefox…

I think that the major advantage I have found so far is the fact that each tab runs on a different process, which is the way things should be. That way, when one page crashes, it isn’t your whole browser that goes down but just that very page. In a time where web exploits are at their peak, this is very important. Also kudos to the fact that you can easily detach tabs from a window into a separate window, and then add tabs to that window that you just created. It really is THAT easy!

The major disadvantage, is the fact that you can’t switch dictionaries quickly and conveniently from the context menu inside a “textarea” which you can do on Firefox. For someone who has to alternate between Portuguese and English dictionaries, this is a major turn-down. Specially because it seems that you even have to restart the browser for the changes to take effect. Bad, bad Google. What were you thinking?!

Other than this I have also loved the seamless integration with Windows Vista. Chrome just integrates much better on Vista’s look than Firefox does. Firefox barely supports transparency, whereas Chrome allows for transparency, even on the zone where the tabs reside.

In a nutshell, it’s still a beta version, and that does show. Try it at your own peril, but try it nonetheless. I think you will be impressed.