Google Chrome... what do you all think?

Discussion in 'Software' started by dlb, Sep 3, 2008.

  1. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

  2. joelsz

    joelsz First Sergeant

    Just downloaded it this morning.
    It appears at first glance to be compact and quick.
    It doesn't recognize many of the features of code that MSPublisher uses for website building, but neither do FireFox, Opera, Safari or Navigator.
    I only mention this because one of the websites I administer use this coding and I had to create alternative non IE browser friendly versions of the site to accomodate their users.
    I haven't run across any other problems as yet, but if I do I will post them.
     
  3. augiedoggie

    augiedoggie The Canadian Loon - LocoAugie (R.I.P. 2012)

    Pretty good so far, only thing I don't like is the imported bookmarks being two levels down but hopefully I can change that. It is very fast compared to FF at least for MG because at times it's very slow, like 5 secs to load a page, this has been going on now through several reformats over the last couple of years. We'll see as time goes by of course. Pretty decent so far and hopefully gets better as it moves along.
     
  4. DavidGP

    DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member

    Bookmarks bar and how to open saved favorites is a terrible implementation, hope they change the way favorites are actioned in later releases, while its different its not easily actioned.

    One bug is I found in my systems install is that when you have the bookmarks bar showing, then goto Options and choose a default page to load as homepage on start then until show Bookmark Bar, it doesnt go but just moves slightly down with a while line between it and the address bar, likely a random occurance so may not be a reproducable for all. I fond I needed to remove the custom bookmarks to open and then add new again to clear this from happening.



    Speed is ok, nothing earth shattering, but its early days and like all betas it will get better, sadly Google have a history of leaving the majority of applications in long term beta, only have to site Gmail in this respect ( although I do personally treat all software be it a final version as betas anyhow as they are never fully finished works ). IE8 and FF3 as well as OperaTor load much quicker and render pages quicker too for me, only taken an eyeball speed reference over a tech test.

    Its search box implementaion is ok, as you search via the address bar over a seperate option as in IE or FF, while you can use the address bar in IE or FF, having one dual purpose bar is better for less wasted realestate on your browser.

    It's GUI looks ok, clean and simple.

    Lacking browser plugins, ie. Sliverlight, runs Adobe Flash a bit jerky on a few sites I tried, Java applet apps are patchy, likely to be others especially for audio/video heavy sites.

    Not as yet willing to trust it to me doing online banking or shopping via, would need to review this in 6mths time.


    I agree with you on this, minor GUI error though on that menu which needs sorting.


    All the things above I mention I have feedback via the report a bug to the Google Chome Team.
     
  5. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

  6. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

  7. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    The Good:

    1) Task Manager!
    This alone is an idea worthy of merit, and I hope other browsers adopt the idea (I'm talking about you, Firefox.) instead of chugging to a halt whenever something happens on a tab on the other side of known existence. I just had a plugin crash, but lo and behold, the browser still stands.

    2) Extension of Opera's Speed Dial. (and similar options from a couple of Firefox plugins) I like the combination of most used pages, search engine, recently closed tabs, etc.

    3) It's pretty speedy so far, especially in google-run apps. UI is also responsive to a degree that Firefox will probably never be, simply because of how it was designed. (a giant wad of javascript talking to XUL?) I'd say the UI responsiveness is more in line with Opera and K-Meleon.

    The Bad & The Ugly
    1) No plugins, not much customization available. This includes things like Roboform, which is a dealbreaker for a good many people.

    2) No Skins (yet?)

    This whole thing is still in beta, but I like some of the concepts it's introducing. Maybe it'll make Firefox sit up and take notice, especially since Google chose WebKit over their Gecko rendering engine.
     
  8. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    Great info so far peeps! Keep it up! Thank you Halo for your in-depth "review".... very informative. I'm always a bit reluctant to try new browsers (I have no idea why) esp. when they're still in Beta. I just upgraded to FF3 a couple days ago if that tells you anything. ;)
    Anyway- great stuff folks... thanks!

    More "reviews" are invited and encouraged :-D
     
  9. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    Google Chrome now has a portable version. This is totally cool because it will allow me to check out the new browser without having to install it!!!
    For those of you that are interested, it's available here at Major Geeks. :major

    I'm using it at this very moment to post this.... so far, I like it. It's really clean; no clutter, but that might mean that some of the options/configuration settings may be difficult to access. Clicking the wrench in the top right corner provides some options (home page setting for example).... so far, so good!
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2008
  10. LauraR

    LauraR MajorGeeks Super-Duper Administrator Staff Member

    I said this in the other thread in Interesting Links....I do not like the Updater.

    It was connecting every 5 minutes or so to the internet on it's own without the browser open.

    Doesn't that concern anyone else? Am I over reacting?

    After I uninstalled Chrome, Updater was not uninstalled and continued to connect.:confused
     
    Last edited: Sep 5, 2008
  11. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

    LauraR, how did you get rid of the updater after the uninstall? Clean the Registry entries? Bazza

    ===

     
  12. LauraR

    LauraR MajorGeeks Super-Duper Administrator Staff Member

    I had to go in and stop the process from running. I had to go into registry. I had to do a search and delete the .exe for it. Went into hidden folders and deleted the folder it stuck in Application Data folder.

    Finally got rid of it.


    Ridiculous for a simple browser if you ask me, if not suspect.
     
  13. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    After reading the above 3 posts, I'm really glad that I didn't install this and that I'm just using the portable.... like I said earlier:
    I've had the portable crash 3 times in the past 15 minutes or so. You know, the old "...has encountered an error and was closed..." routine. This happened when I typed a search term in the address bar; it would go black (yes, the entire address bar turned into one big black box), lock up for about 20 seconds, then crash. And there's no "home" button, at least not an obvious one. :confused
    My first impressions of Chrome were initially pretty good, but I've been using it (the portable) for a total of maybe 20 minutes and have had 3 crashes, and on the whole it seems a bit slow, but that may be because I'm running the portable and not the installed version.
     
  14. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    Me+regedit > Updater. :-D

    Anyways...I like it. Its an alternative to Safari, and I am hoping I can compile my own WebKit engine and use it to run as the frontend GUI.
     
  15. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    I like the startup editing options available with CCleaner. They're a lot more convenient than most other methods, and I already have the app installed for it's main purpose: ccleaning.
     
  16. Bugballou

    Bugballou MajorGeek

    Haven't tried it, hear it is full of holes .I do use Picasa, Google Earth, and G Mail though. Hopefully the holes will be filled by the time they release a Linux version. FF3, Flock, and Opera, on occasion, are my browsers of choice at present.
     
  17. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    I read somewhere (I think it was on /.) that the source code was pretty heavily windows based... I wouldn't hold my breath for a native linux release anytime soon.

     
  18. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

  19. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    Hmm. Maybe I should have checked that out on Chromium. From what I understand though (and I'm very often wrong), Chrome and Chromium are different, Chromium being a longstanding project that Google forked a while ago to create Chrome from.

    That, and there's a red box that says it doesn't work on linux, despite compiling correctly. Also, the code looks like it was made with Visual C++. Not sure how that effects portability to linux though. I've never tried to write a cross-platform application in C++.
     
  20. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    Pretty sure they are one and the same.

    http://blog.chromium.org/
    I don't see the advantage of a nix port anyway. OS X, maybe. There is already an epiphany version being worked on using the WebKit backend, and performs largely the same. In fact, I was able to pass the Acid 3 test with it--Chrome cannot.

    TBH, most WebKit browsers perform similarly. Same as Gecko based browsers, Trident based browsers, etc.
     
  21. evilfantasy

    evilfantasy Malware Fighter

    New forum (Chromespot) with some customizations and themes
     
  22. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    Epiphany with a WebKit backend?

    That actually sounds rather cool. From what I understand, implementing the gecko engine is rather hard. It might have changed considerably since the last time I looked, but from what I hear it suffers from poor documentation and lack of instruction on how to actually go about incorporating it into desired product.
     
  23. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    What do you mean?
    Epiphany currently installs with the gecko backend by default. The WebKit backend is something new being worked on. Of course, WebKit is just a fork of KHTML, which KDE already has in its browser. WebKit in itself isn't anything really new. I REALLLY like Konqueror in KDE 4.
     
  24. bigbazza

    bigbazza R.I.P. 14/12/2011 - Good Onya Geek

  25. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    It seems they have removed that controversial clause in the EULA that some people interpreted to mean that google now own all of the internet and everything it ever touched.
     
  26. duckfeet

    duckfeet Corporal

    I use Opera on linux, Firefox on my Mac, and was using Opera on my XP box...only reason I mention this, is that I only downloaded Chrome to the XP deal, since they did mention *speed*, and FF *and* Opera sometimes get bogged down a bit...and so far Chrome has been working fine for me...yeah, it took some getting used to, and as you all know, I can't just swap my bookmarks from Opera, but I could get'em over to Chrome, if it matter that much...

    I haven't had any problems w/the updater, and I just updated latest chrome edition, and so far, so good...I had to tweak the preferences a bit, to setup downloads and some other things the way I want, but I like the way the tabs work, remembering my main sites...and once I got the toolbar figured out, so I could put favorites up there, too...it's working fine...I'm missing some of the search setups I had for address bar on OPera, and some other things...but in exchange I have a nice, simple, browser, and they could've done a lot worse,,,and it's open source, so it's only time until it's setup for linux anyway...tho I'll probably keep Opera on Linux, just in case Chrome starts forgetting that *speed* and simplicity were it's selling points...and let's face it: only google has any chance of being serious competition to Win IE...
     
  27. curtain-calling

    curtain-calling Private E-2

    I downloaded google chrome. While I only used the browser for perhaps 10 minutes or so, I couldn't help but get annoyed at my zone alarm pinging itself every 3 minutes or so -all- for updates? I pretty quickly uninstalled the program, but it still would zing my zone alarm for updates, to which I said no to. That was a couple of days ago, and I've rebooted several times since and have had no more pings from it. I'm not sure I would want this browser.
     
  28. duckfeet

    duckfeet Corporal

    Yep, I was on another forum, and it seems that the steady "updates" is a constant problem, for some...I must have somehow, set mine, to *not* check updates, as I myself checked yesterday, and got the latest update, but other than that, pctools log doesn't show this much activity...I'm going to look at the log, or turn off the PCtools "o.k." to google, and see how much it's really checking: i like everything about google, it's simplicity and speed, in it's search engine: that's why it came out on top, and so I kind of look at Chrome the same way...but I also know that google is hugely profit motivated, so they're bound to use their browser--once we get used to it--to try to sell stuff, rather than just to see where we land...we'll see...


     
  29. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest

    Thats hardly true. Firefox has been an increasingly large thorn in Microsoft's side, and it only gets worse as time goes on.
     
  30. Adrynalyne

    Adrynalyne Guest



    You could always have removed the updater from starting up.
     
  31. chaimjm

    chaimjm Staff Sergeant

    I installed on my XP and it automatically installed in Hebrew (my location being Israel) which is fine as I have no problem with the language but I thought just for the experiment I would change it to English it accepted the change asked for a restart and reopened in Hebrew the for me is a major fault
     
  32. oma

    oma MajorGeek

  33. asplode

    asplode Private E-2

    Seems like all of a sudden everyone loves to hate Google?

    The omnibar sending info back to google is no different than the search bar in firefox doing it, or on google's own homepage. I'm not terribly concerned with the privacy implications of it, because if I'm going to search for it, they're going to know what I searched for. Seems like a requirement to get any results.
     
  34. oma

    oma MajorGeek

    I removed the Awesome Bar from Firefox with a little tweak.

    Each their own... just found the link I posted, read it and passed it along. ;)
     
  35. oma

    oma MajorGeek

    Yep, that's it. Additionally removed the recently visited bookmarks folder by right clicking it and deleting it. Didn't like that one either.
     

MajorGeeks.Com Menu

Downloads All In One Tweaks \ Android \ Anti-Malware \ Anti-Virus \ Appearance \ Backup \ Browsers \ CD\DVD\Blu-Ray \ Covert Ops \ Drive Utilities \ Drivers \ Graphics \ Internet Tools \ Multimedia \ Networking \ Office Tools \ PC Games \ System Tools \ Mac/Apple/Ipad Downloads

Other News: Top Downloads \ News (Tech) \ Off Base (Other Websites News) \ Way Off Base (Offbeat Stories and Pics)

Social: Facebook \ YouTube \ Twitter \ Tumblr \ Pintrest \ RSS Feeds