Google Chrome review

Jonathan Bray September 24, 2010

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When Google launched its Chrome browser, we at PC Pro were as shocked as the next man. This is a potentially huge release, yet Google had kept it quiet during its whole two years of development.

And, despite the fact that this is Google’s first “own-brand” browser, it can already be counted as one of the big boys. By borrowing heavily, on Google’s own admission, from other open-source browser projects, such as Firefox and WebKit – and contributing some of its own, notably its JavaScript engine, dubbed V8 – Google has managed to produce a polished web browser first time out.

The first thing we noticed with Chrome was its speed. It launches like a greyhound out of a trap, with all types of pages loading in incredibly quick time. Side-by-side with Firefox 3 or the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, it feels snappier, though timing the load times with a stopwatch revealed there’s very little in it.

The PC Pro and BBC homepages loaded in roughly five seconds, while other, more complicated sites, such as Zoho Writer, took longer – 13 to 14 seconds to load on Firefox, Chrome and IE 8. But in a stress test Chrome edged ahead – we loaded 30 tabs on each browser, then visited the BBC iPlayer website and YouTube to see how smoothly video would play back. In all instances, Chrome managed the smoother result.

Stability is mighty impressive too. Google is making great play of the fact that it launches each and every tab in a different Windows process. The idea behind this is that it makes the browser more robust. With websites increasingly becoming more like applications than static pages, this is an important development. Fire up Windows’ task manager and click on the Processes bar and you’ll see what Google is talking about: for every tab you have open there’s a separate Google Chrome entry in the list. And if a tab hangs, you can terminate it manually if you like – Chrome has its own, built-in Tab Manager, that allows you to do this.

Reliable runner

The second thing you’ll notice is that it’s remarkably reliable for a first timer. Admittedly, at the time of writing we’ve only had the chance to work with Chrome for a day or so, but so far we’re impressed; 99% of the time we had no problems. Hundreds of sites of every type we can think of: from video intensive Flash sites such as BBC iPlayer and YouTube to Ajax-heavy sites such as Zoho Writer and Sheet, and everything in between, including secure shopping sites, and sites with Java and ActiveX controls.

It’s not perfect – for instance in Zoho Writer dialog boxes cause the page to blank out behind them momentarily, the Ctrl-S shortcut for save doesn’t seem to have any effect and the site also caused a couple of tab crashes – but elsewhere it just seems to work, and for a browser that’s still in its infancy that’s an astonishing achievement.

Third on the list of good first impressions is a clean, unfussy interface design. In typical Google fashion, Chrome is minimalist in the extreme: all you get to start with is a very simple toolbar. This features forward and back and refresh buttons, an address bar and a couple of menu icons to the right of it – one for general browser settings and one for more page-specific options. There’s no Home button on the toolbar (though you can enable this in the options), no separate Google search box, and neither is there a bookmarks toolbar, though again the latter can be initiated with a simple keystroke and then hidden away once more.
Feature light?

Inevitably the simple approach means that Google lacks some of the niceties of Firefox and IE. There’s no facility to tag favourites, for instance, no vast library of plugins nor mechanism for adding them. More significantly, there’s no RSS feed reader capability built into Chrome.

But what you do get is well-formed and efficiently delivered. Google’s take on the Firefox Awesome bar – the Omnibox – works just as well as Firefox’s effort. Start typing and Chrome simultaneously offers results, plus word completion suggestions, from not only your browsing history (it imports this from your default browser, so we were able to search our history straight away) but also your default search engine. It’s worth noting that it searches the text of pages in your history as well as just the URLs – bettering Firefox’s address-only search.

Naturally Google search is preselected, but you also get the choice, with a simple right click, to change this to MSN, Yahoo or Ask.com, and adding new engines is very easy. Chrome will even add items to the search engine list automatically as you visit pages it thinks are appropriate. On our rounds it added Cuil, Facebook and YouTube. Sometimes, as you type the name of a stored search engine you’re given the option to hit Tab and search directly from the address bar.

Start a new tab and you’re faced with a thumbnail grid of your nine most frequently used websites, recent bookmarks, plus a search box – another nice touch. And there’s anonymous browsing via Chrome’s Incognito mode, which allows you to browse the web while leaving no trace – it works in much the same way as Apple Safari’s Private Browsing function.

The basics are dealt with in no-nonsense fashion. Settings dialog are easy to understand and straightforward. Your browsing history and downloads, instead of being displayed in a sidebar, are simply displayed on a web page. We’re not sure the lack of sidebars is a step forward, but the stripped-bare approach does make most of Chrome’s features easy to get to grips with.

Overall, this simple approach is entirely effective. Its speed and stability bode extremely well for the future. It’s already much more impressive than the first beta of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta was and right now, apart from the odd glitch and the lack of RSS reader, it’s close to rivalling Firefox. We have to say we’re smitten.

• Read Darien Graham-Smith’s in-depth breakdown of Chrome’s underlying technologies

Download the latest version of Google Chrome here

Details
Software subcategory	Web browser
Requirements
Processor requirement	N/A
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	yes
Operating system Windows XP supported?	yes
Operating system Linux supported?	yes
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	yes
Other operating system support	depends on browser