So I’ve been tooling around with Google’s Chrome browser, released a couple weeks ago. I’ve been a loyal, die-hard Firefox fan for a few years now, so it’s going to have to really shine for me to stick with it over time.
After a couple of weeks, I’ve found I really enjoy the simplistic, wide-open feel to it. It’s unobtrusive, you see more of the page, and it’s uncluttered. I love the new tab page, which shows screen caps of your nine most-visited sites so you can easily jump to your regular time-wasters, and the openness of it is ideal for my tablet PC using the pen on the touch screen.
However, it falls flat in a few areas, such as bookmarks (it auto-imports from other browsers, which is nice, but doesn’t have folders, just the bookmark bar), and, oddly enough, YouTube videos seem to have issues, especially when embedded in other websites. You’d think that YouTube, a Google product, would work better with their new browser. Another minor issue is that my tablet PC’s pen flicks, which allow for easy navigation (swipe it right-to-left across the screen to go back) is a little buggy, causing it to go back two or three pages at a time, but given that it’s a beta and I don’t think anyone designs a browser with a tablet PC and pen flicks in mind, I’m able to overlook that one.
Still, it’s worth playing around with and we’ll see what they come up with in future versions, but for now I’m sticking with the Mozilla team.
