Google Chrome Impressions
Google certainly made a big splash with their browser, the "blogosphere" is totally saturated with talk of Chrome. Overall, I’m pretty impressed by it. To me it feels like a "beefed up" Safari. It’s got Webkit under the hood, it comes with that fancy web inspector and activity monitor, and it has that all-around polished feel of Safari.
Chrome is super-fast, but for me not having extensions (yet) is kind of a deal breaker. There’s no built-in RSS reader, which is a minor oversight, but I thought they would have included it. I like the "speed dial" start page when you launch the browser (or a new window/tab), but I’d like to be able to define the sites myself as well as have it list my most frequently visited.
Some people have complained about their EULA being a tad over-ambitious, i.e. "anything you do or create or look at using Chrome is now property of Google forever and ever." Whether it’s all just legal jargon or it’s actually overly restricitve and invasive has yet to be seen and will probably be worked out over the next few days. (Looks like they’re already on it.)
Then there’s also the (confirmed?) story that Chrome is a glorified keylogger with a browser built on top. Apparently their "omni box" location bar can record anything you type into it and send it off to the mothership for analysis. Turn off auto-suggest or use "incognito" mode to prevent this.
Despite the tinfoil hat silliness, I think Google has done an excellent job of creating a browser that can go head-to-head with the other major players in the arena. Considering this is the first release of their first browser, and they have nowhere to go but up, Chrome’s future looks pretty promising.
Well said. Pretty much sums it up. Google has balls, this was a risky move.
Though as Seth Godin (the Purple Cow) puts is; “safe is risky” nowadays.
posted on: September 19th, 2008 at 9:17 am