Well, it is time. I have played with the new “operating system from google” for a bit now, and I am ready to let the world know… well both my readers… what it’s like… and the doctor says:
<sigh> Well, at least it’s still in beta.
For information, I will be banging on about “built around Safari” throughout. I know that technically its built on top of the web toolkit that Safari is built on, but a lot has also been taken from Safari itself, so technically, until Chrome becomes a new product I will probably be coining the phrase Safari2 a bite later as well – deal with it.
While Google Chrome doesn’t have any really radical down sides, I don’t seem to be able to bring myself to use it as a fully fledged browser, and it only has a couple of interesting up sides – not nearly enough to cause me to spontaneously googasm.
The only reasonably cool thing I can see is the “application shortcut” feature. This is the bit that allows you to store a link and have it launch in a window without all the “chrome-isms” which aren’t actually all that many in the first place. The benefit here is that if you use web-mail for example, it can be saved as a link on your desktop, start menu or quick launch and… well, that about it really. pretty similar to actually saving a shortcut to the website in the first place. Google docs, Google mail… If you’ve just had multiple googasms, then Chrome does make these apps (and other web site/apps) look a little nicer – other than that though, not more features that I can see.
Another “nice” feature is the sumary home page. Instead of your normal google homepage the chrome homepage can be set to show you mini screenshots of the sites you have visited recently. Wooo. This page seems to be the only place you can access book marks as well.
It is pretty pretty. With Vista glass console the ‘etched’ banner is really nice, and it does resample scaled images a little nicer than Internet Explorer.
So where do I start with the “googrumbles”.
The most annoying feature for me as a developer is that it is another flippin browser to code for. Not happy with the 2 mainstream browsers in the world – Firefox and IE – I now have to code for the third most annoying browser on the planet – Safari. Luckily the majority of sites I have visited that work smoothly in Firefox seem to work pretty well in Chrome. Ironically however the Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) changes you can add to control both Firefox and Safari toolkits invalidate the CSS – meaning that your site is technically not W3C compliant. Oh, and the flash uploader in WordPress does not work – even with the flash plugin plugged in and working.
My only other real annoyance is the complete lack of any useful plugins. You do get the dictionary “plugin” by default (which does not work in rich text fields by the way), but that’s about it. Since it is built around Safari though you can get Flash, Shockwave and Acrobat components as separate downloads from the vendors, however you are currently forced into needing an experimental version of Java to make anything javay work. JRE 6 update 10 will soon move into mainstream so this will become less of an issue. If you want anything like Firebug, Adblock, Fasterfox or nay of the thousands of useful plugins you can get for Firefox, well, tough. Maybe when Chrome comes out of beta people may start writing stuff for it 
A couple of other niggles are that the browser has problems displaying lists in that the ball in LI items seems to render as a blocky plus sign, and the way you navigate the cursor though a text field is odd in the word boundaries.
In summary my beloved reader, if you got it already then more power to ya. If you are thinking about getting it, well, you can probably not loose any sleep because you don’t have it – you’re not missing much.