Google Chrome Test Drive

Google Chrome is fast, why wouldn’t it be? There seems to be next to no overhead. It combines the search and address bar into one Omnibox. So you just type what your looking for in one spot and Google Chrome does the rest. It does have tabs, which I have become really fond of since discovering Firefox.

And what’s the best bit about Firefox? The Add-Ons. I have at least five add-on toolbars and countless little add-ons for such mundane events as word counts and spell checking. I have toolbars for StumbleUpon, Digg, Mr Wong, Delicious, Mixx, and Propeller. I have an SEO toolbar that tells me about links and metatags and all that kind of jazz. And so on and so forth. Do these endless add-ons slow Firefox down? A bit, yes, but the info I get from them is worth the small time lags.

Google Chrome has a really clean look and feel. There is something nice about going to the Google Home page and seeing all that empty space. Of course, I can do full screen on Firefox or Explorer and get the same effect.

The only different feature I have found, not that there are that many features to find-is Incognito, which allows you to search without leaving footprints in History. This would be useful while searching for porn on the office computer, or to keep David Duchovny’s therapist from finding what he has been looking at. There’s also a text zoom for the visually challenged web surfer.

Putting Google Chrome’s speediness to the test by opening ten tabs brought Google Chrome to it’s knees. It took a couple of minutes for all of the sites to load and then it closed half of them for script errors. That was the first time, after that it loaded ten tabs quickly and easily.

These are Entrecard site where I drop cards, and the drops were all but instantaneous. So I am using Google Chrome for my Entrecard Drops-so long as I don’t try it with too many tabs. It is faster than using Firefox for Entrecard dropping, though of course I am still tempted by the occasional blog post that I want to read.

The lack of speed is due to the limitations of my PC and not Google Chrome. Explorer doesn’t seem to have any way to open several tabs with a single click as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox do.

A fellow Plurker was talking about all the web browser they use the other day and I wasn’t even aware that most of them were still around. I have used either Windows Explorer or Mozilla Firefox for the past several years. I think that Firefox will continue to be my primary web browser, but I will give Google Chrome a shot with Entrecard Dropping.