I’ve been playing around with the Google Chrome browser since the beta was released a few days ago. Normally, I won’t bother much with new browsers since, well they’re all pretty similar by this time. But I decided to look at Chrome because after reading Google’s Chrome webcomic, aimed at developers, I was quite intrigued and curious.
The first thing that impressed me was how much noticeably faster Chrome is compared to Firefox on my machine. But in fairness, Chrome doesn’t have the plugins I have loaded in Firefox, still it is impressive. But to cut to the chase, on my machine at least, Chrome and YouTube videos do not play nicely together. Videos would play properly at first, but later they start to play then no sound and no motion video at all. Right now, that’s a deal breaker for me.
Some other things I ran into were buttons in which the text was truncated, and page time out errors on some sites. It was like Chrome gives loading a page faster than Firefox if the web server at the other end is a little slow, which is common for heavily trafficked sites. The button issue may be due to my use of Stardock Windowblinds, nevertheless, Firefox has no problem with this.
I’ll still use Chrome on and off as it is updated, but it’ll need a lot more polish before I would seriously consider replacing Firefox with Chrome. My hope is that Firefox may adopt the V8 javascript engine and some other Chrome concepts in future versions. I suspect that Google hopes for that as well and Chrome is just a friendly nudge.