MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Google’s new Chrome Web browser has been generating buzz since its beta launch last week, but does the new browser deserve the alternating hype and excoriation it has received?Reviews of Chrome’s underlying technology and philosophy and its performance have been mixed. While most reviewers at least grudgingly admit Chrome is serviceable, a few claim it shows promise to become the most secure, fastest, most accurate browsing tool available, topping both Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 8 beta and matching Apple’s Safari in all categories.
But will Google ease fractured political ideologies, end global warming and world hunger, and ensure every surfer has a roof over his or her head and access to affordable healthcare?
I downloaded and installed a copy of Chrome to see what the fuss was about, and I’ve got to say my first reaction was not entirely positive. Chrome is perhaps most accurately described as a “minimalist” approach to design. That’s not a bad thing, unless the pursuit of additional screen real estate on which to view Web pages makes interacting with the browser itself challenging. There is no menu bar across Chrome’s top, so finding the things I’m accustomed to having sprinkled across the top of both Firefox and IE required a bit of learning on my part. I hate it when browsers attempt to hide functions from people who simply want to get a job done.
Complicating matters, the tutorial for Chrome is in video format. Whatever happened to giving a user searchable written documentation? At its heart, isn’t Google a search engine, after all?
Importing bookmarks presented a whole new set of challenges. Chrome will import bookmarks from both IE 8 and Firefox, but it doesn’t demonstrate any remarkable skill or accuracy in that pursuit. I will be the first to admit I bookmark way too much “stuff,” and I categorize it to death. In both Firefox and IE, I have subfolders to about the fifth level. The IE bookmarks seem to have imported without a hitch during install, but dragging the Firefox bookmarks into Chrome post-installation left me with only the bookmarks that existed in the bottom level of categorized folders. For example, none of the uncategorized bookmarks in Firefox — like links to my blog’s admin page, Gmail’s sign-in page and Yahoo! Groups —appeared under the “Imported from Firefox” folder Chrome created automatically. There were no general links in the “Writing” folder imported from Firefox either, nor in the “Tools” folder imported under “Writing.” However, I found links in the “Fiction” folder under “Tools.”
Ignoring everything above the bottom level in a carefully categorized hierarchy is not incredibly helpful, at least in my worldview.
New bookmarks are easy to add: Simply click the star icon to the left of the address window, and voila. Score one for Chrome.
All of those irritations aside, however, Chrome does seem poised to become a threat to Microsoft’s dominance in the Web browser space. Firefox, which Google has supported for years and with which Google plans to maintain an advertising alliance through 2011, captured nearly 20 percent of the worldwide browser market with its latest Firefox offering, due in large part to the browser’s speed and security features. Microsoft quickly responded with similar tools and speed in IE 8’s beta. Interface issues notwithstanding, Chrome may make a dent in both companies’ efforts by cherry picking the best of both worlds. Like IE 8, Chrome offers users the ability to surf incognito and to block pop-ups and other ads. Like Firefox, it’s quick to display page components.
Or — has been the case with Google’s instant-messaging product, which failed to gain any significant foothold against rival products marketed by Microsoft and AOL — it could fall flat on its face.
What is disturbing about Google’s entry into the browser wars is that should Chrome attract a significant user base, no one knows how that might impact the online advertising wars. Google is the undisputed leader in that field, and its recent acquisition of the DoubleClick advertising network gave it sophisticated new behavioral tracking tools to incorporate across all of its properties. Any good conspiracy theorist will say that incestuous relationship invokes the specter of illegitimate children arising from the inhuman coupling of Frankenstein’s monster and Big Brother.
Chrome is free and downloadable from Google’s website. Currently it only works with Windows-based systems, but Google has said it continues to ready Macintosh and Linux versions.
