Finally I had the opportunity to give Google's new web browser Google Chrome a test drive. Google Chrome installs in under 3 minutes which is pretty impressive! Launching Google Chrome is also pretty fast it's pretty much instant in launching when compared to Firefox 3 which pauses for a bit. Below is a table of memory usage on first load for each browser using Google as their home page.
Browser | Memory Used |
IE 7 | 12,276 K |
Google Chrome | 19,184 K |
Firefox 3 | 44, 376 K |
Google Chromes memory usage appears similar to Internet Explorer. Loading pages is almost instant with Google Chrome while there appears to be the slightest of hiccups with Firefox, Internet Explorer appears to be the slowest (on my machine) when loading web pages. I am not sure if Google Chrome loads pages in a clever way that make them appear almost instant, whatever it does its pretty smooth.
So what features do you get with Google Chrome? Well on first inspection Google Chrome is incredibly light weight it reminds you of the earlier versions of Firefox. Hidden away in the interface is tabbing, book marking and a developer menu. One thing I couldn't find though was the Google Toolbar! Oh well maybe its planned for a future release? Typing URL's into the search bar kicks in an intelligent Google Suggest type interface for the closest match to what you are typing. Right click on any element on the page reveals a context menu with an "Inspect element" option which opens up a new window with an HTML element and resource inspector. The inspector also enables you to view a graph of how long items took to download and their size, however I was unable to get this to work.
Over all I really like Google Chrome I am not entirely sure what it uses under the covers they have mentioned using components from Mozilla Firefox and Apples Webkit. Whatever they have used the experience for me so far has been good.