Google Chrome test drive

Is Google Chrome any good?

With all the hype over the past few days about the arrival of Google Chrome beta, I thought I best take the new web browser on the block for a quick spin. It can be downloaded from here: www.google.com/chrome, if any one would care to give it a try.

My initial impressions before trying Google Chrome are that I will probably keep using FF as my main browser, although I also have IE7, Safari and Opera kicking about they all barely ever get used for anything other than browser compatibility testing.

Okay, firstly, I'm not sure that a lot of people will want their most visited websites appearing on the home page - in a work environment this is going to be a big no no for anyone who likes a bit of extra-curricula browsing, and well elsewhere, we just don't always want people to see exactly what we've been looking at which could quickly give away which bank we use, who our customers are, our shopping preferences or even a penchant for porn websites to anyone who happens to walk in the room or look over your shoulder. From a privacy perspective, this browser shoots itself in the foot straight off. Ok so you can turn off the internet history as with most browsers, but I doubt more than 10% of users will be savvy enough to do this for themselves.

There is one cool privacy feature that certainly deserves a mention and this is the incognito window, which pretty much says what it does on the tin - Google's Chrome Browser promises that

Pages that you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.

This feature goes a long way to overcoming my above reservations - but don't forget that Google Chrome will store your browsing history and cookies etc, by default, so if you don't activate it then your privacy is at risk not just on the Internet but from those who share your home and workspace as well.

In terms of appearance Google Chrome is very clean and crisp and appears to render CSS in a pretty standard way without any gotchas or workarounds needed - but time will tell here through more vigorous usage.

I'm also noticing that from a search perspective Google Chrome seems to be serving up newer results than google.co.uk results displaying on FF. Either this, or the results are being ordered slightly differently. Anyway, a search for one of my new customers' keywords came up page 2 second on FF and page 1 10th on Google Chrome and the results were the same after several repeat searches on both over a few minutes. This keyword had been showing up as page 2 2nd for a couple of days already, so I can only assume that Google Chrome gets new results faster, which should make it popular with SEOs. This might offer a useful way of finding out more quickly whether you are due to head upwards or downwards in the SERPS, but again don't take me at my word here.

I don't like the fact that there is no reload or refresh option on right-mouse-click. I also don't think I'm really too keen on the fact that the zoom option only has three settings - smaller, normal and larger. This is surely not so good from an accessibility perspective. On the plus side there are some slick features such as being able to add application shortcuts to the browser and use it pretty much as a desk top, the incognito browsing and the tab features, but overall, I don't think this is any threat to IE or Mozilla - 6/10 for Google Chrome.