Akshay Jain

Like everyone, I immediately downloaded the new Google Chrome browser that is supposed to have been released today and frankly, I am pretty excited about it as this will completely change and modify the browser wars that have been prevailing between Microsoft’s Internet explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox (and to some extent Opera also ;))

Firstly, I would like to start my review by giving a very important piece of information that I read some days back when Google had formally announced their intention to enter the browser market. They had come up with a Comic Strip which goes into the details / technicalities of this new browser and why this is better than the rest. Here is the link for those having the patience and the technical bent of mind to go through it : LINK

The geeky stuff first: 

1. This browser supposedly has a better permission management system so that the websites are opened with a lower permission than the users. This means that there is absolutely minimalistic chance of a virus/spamware/malware infecting a users computer. 

2. Every website runs as a seperate process under windows. This means that if a partuclar website manages to hang a particular process, the working of the other websites within the browser will not be affected. The users can directly close the troubling process.

3. Since every tab is opened as a new process, this means that there is no longer any possibility of memory leaks and overusage of memory. (This is theoritically true, but practically, after opening 4-5 tabs Chrome is using more memory than Firefox or Opera). But, anyways, the memory does not slow down the browser as there is no fragmentation.

4. There is a clean and a neat “task manager” built specifically for Chrome from where you can see the stats of all the open tabs and see which particlar website is creating trouble. Here is the screenshot for this:

If you click on the “Stats for nerds” button in that screenshot, that is even more interesting for me. Here is the screenshot showing Chrome using more memory than the other browser that is currently running on my system (Opera)

5. Incognito Mode: This I believe has been copied from the Internet Explorer 8 beta that was announced by Microsoft a week ago. Frankly, this is a nice feature but this kind of a thing was available in Firefox for a long time now by adding some additional extensions. 

6. Instant bookmarking by clicking on the star on the left hand side. This is nothing path breaking to implement and because Google has implemented it, I am wondering why didnt other developers think  of such a simple thing before this? (Thats Google at its best, thinking why do we do things that we do ;))

There are some more advantages like a better and faster javascript rendering engine called V8 and a cleaner interface in terms of moving of tabs and moving from one tab to another. 

So far every website that I have opened has worked fine at my end (including very complex websites like Godaddy’s domain management panel which in Opera even, but has worked absolutely fine in Chrome). I am sure that this is sure to gain a lot of share in the browser market given the fact that Google is advertising it on its homepage (the most expensive piece of Real Estate on the internet).

Lets see how this goes. I havent seen any kinds of bugs in it till now and no kind of vulnerabilities also have been detected. 

To end it up, although I never recommend people to download Beta versions, this one is definately an exception. You must try it out if you are interested in trying out differnt things. 

(P.s. : I just downloaded this browser 10minutes ago and am still experimenting with its features. Will keep the readers updated if I manage to find any new features that I think deserve mention )