Google Chrome 18.0.1017.2 Beta

For a long, long time Google and Mozilla worked very well together. Google provided an excellent search engine while Mozilla provided an excellent web browser – I’m obviously talking about Firefox. But the whole thing went sour for Mozilla as Google, in the autumn of 2008, decided it can come up with a web browser of its own, that will look and behave just like the Mountain View-based search engine giant wants.

What Google came up with is Chrome, a web browser that you can get free of charge, works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, and does pretty much what you’d expect a browser to do. The main functionality of Chrome is to let you surf the web – in this regard, it does a beautiful job. What’s interesting here is how fast Chrome lets you browse the web. Google come up with a JavaScript engine called V8 that can boast about being the fastest JavaScript engine on the market today. It beats Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine (even if marginally), and if definitely beats Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Apart from the speed, which is phenomenal, Google Chrome fails to surpass what other browsers out there are offering. It comes with the same features that Firefox and IE (Internet Explorer) come. Like the fact that when you want to visit a known malicious site, the browser first displays a warning page. Or the fact that you can surf the web in “incognito mode.” Every time you surf the web, the pages you visited show up in the web history – with “incognito mode” you can surf away safe in the knowledge that this will not happen. Or the fact that the URL address bar servers as a unified box that pulls together web search, web history, suggestions as you type, handy location to bookmark sites, and so on – this is great functionality, but it is nothing new.

I have to say though that I like the new tab page. When you open a new tab, Google Chrome displays the webpages you visit frequently as well as recently bookmarked pages and closed tabs. I also liked the fact that the tabs are detachable and that you can drag and drop them.

There is one area where Firefox trumps Chrome: user interface. The Google Chrome interface is very basic, minimal if you will. Firefox on the other hand had plenty of customization options; any user can tweak the interface to fit his needs and tastes.

Google Chrome, as you would expect from the company that provides search functionality all over the world, comes with extensive language support. There are localized versions of Google Chrome for a total of 50 languages.

Pros
Comes free of charge
Cross-platform (works with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)
Extensive language support
Fast, very fast
New tab page

Cons
Can eat up quite a lot of memory
Plug-in problems

Google Chrome has been reviewed by George Norman on 04 Sep 2009. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated Google Chrome 5 out of 5 stars, naming it Essential