Google Chrome Beta

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So, have you downloaded the new Chrome Beta from Google yet? After hearing about it all day, we are interested to see what you think of it. If you decide to download it and give it a whirl, post your thoughts below.
 
Installer download failed. Error code 0x80042193

Gotta try it at home, corporate firewall is blocking the DL.
 
Wow . . . talk about an ultra fast browser that's simple. Props to Google for this one!
 
Wow, this browser is faster and lighter than firefox/ie combined.

Everything snaps quick at a whim w/o any kind of wait times. I'll see how it goes for other things and it might be a replacement.
 
Hmmm, on Vista Ultimate 32-bit it is slow as dogshit compared to IE8 and Firefox. I'm posting a video to YouTube as we speak. Hmmmm...

anyone got the slowness thing going on?
 
Doesn't seem to work really well with Facebook. Might have limited AJAX support.
 
Well I haven't used it long, but I thought this article was interesting:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10030522-2.html

Sounds like Google wants rights to all your post information.

Crap like that is why firefox will be my only browser for a long, long time....

Hmmm, on Vista Ultimate 32-bit it is slow as dogshit compared to IE8 and Firefox. I'm posting a video to YouTube as we speak. Hmmmm...

anyone got the slowness thing going on?

honestly, i'm wondering if all the people going crazy over the supposed speed of this thing arent just caught up in the placebo effect of the moment? I mean.... can the difference really be *that* noticable? especially when firefox is already damn fast? i would be really interested to see your youtube video....
 
honestly, i'm wondering if all the people going crazy over the supposed speed of this thing arent just caught up in the placebo effect of the moment? I mean.... can the difference really be *that* noticable? especially when firefox is already damn fast? i would be really interested to see your youtube video....

Well, I am seeing like 10 - 15 second load times for a page versus 2 seconds for IE8 and Firefox. I am on a 10Mbps / 1Mbps cable connection.


AND


That EULA really bothers me:

"By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."
 
I am at work so I have not downloaded/installed it yet. I am wondering if this will end up with Firefox users needing to install Chrometab along with our IE tab. I can see google making gmail work better with Chrome than others, or other useful google products/services requiring Chrome for the best experience.

 
My first impressions after about 5 minutes. Overall, Chrome as a whole doesn't seem all that groundbreaking; though I'll admit that I only did a bit of browsing with it - no flash games or web-based applications (which are things I don't care much about anyway).

Render speeds seem snappier than Firefox 3. I also like how each tab is it's own separate process (which in theory will prevent one tab from killing the entire browser; which is something that irks me about Firefox).

It doesn't seem to work well with my proxy though. Chrome's proxy settings menu simply calls up the proxy settings for IE; which implies that it just uses whatever IE uses. However, every time I start up Chrome I have to manually put in my network credentials (which I shouldn't have to do in our Active Directory environment). I'm guessing this is a bug.

I like the idea of keeping it simple, though it's a little too simple for my tastes right now. I can't open up a history or bookmarks sidebar like I always do in IE or Firefox and there appears to be no bookmark management to speak of (at least I couldn't find any). Naturally, there are virtually no plug ins available for Chrome yet.

So far, I'm neither impressed or disappointed with Chrome. I doubt I'll use it when it matures but I hope the separate process feature eventually makes it's way to Firefox - which is so far the only innovative feature I really like about Chrome.
 
This thing is fast.

67MB folder sitting under User\Application Data\Google

No Program Files Folder, but I installed it only for me.
 
my windows testing platforms so far consist of an AthlonX2 6000 with 2gigs of ram and Windows XP/ 2k Pro dual boot, and an Intel Core Duo @ 2.3ghz with 2gigs of ram and Windows Vista Premium. While I can tell a difference in page load times between Chrome and IE6, IE7, and IE8 beta... I can't see any noticeable difference between Chrome and FireFox or Opera 9.

I would expect that if I was still running Windows on something like a Pentium III computer, Chrome would indeed be faster than FireFox or Opera, and I'm halfway expecting that the upcoming Linux release will outpace FireFox on that particular box.

In real world testing I've already come across a couple of sites that don't work or have broken features. Case in point would be www.fleetnet.net : Fleetnet is the service site attached to Fuelman, a gas usage tracking and payment system popular with both large and small corporations across the U.S., and also as of April, the UK. While you won't find me saying Fleetnet has a good design, it's possibly the worst java based system I've ever had the displeasure of working with, it is in widespread use across corporations with fleets.

More minor stuff is broken page placement, case in point would be http://www.mepislovers.org : Nothing major, just some out of place links.

Overall, I see Chrome as more of a tech demonstration... call if FireFox 4 alpha. A lot of the new technologies it introduces are cool, but don't appear to make a drastic change to how I surf the net and use a browser.

That being said, I wonder if Google could be convinced to release Chrome for the PS3 and Wii... might be interesting to see their take on a 10foot user interface.
 
slow as hell. slow to render pages, slow to scroll, hardocp.com renders and scrolls N times faster in firefox.
 
Seems to work well enough. The icon looks like a poke ball. I like all the extra room uptop. Not enough to break me away from Firefox with no-ads extension though.
 
wow, errors and crashes here. And I really wanted to start using it :(
 
I'm loving the experience, i'm getting MUCH faster loadtimes than I am used to. The clean interface is great!
 
Wow, I've been working on an advanced JS project for the past couple of months. Loaded it up to see if Chrome could handle it, did it flawlessly, and faster to boot.

The few developer tools it has are amazing for a first beta release. I'm impressed.

Major UI issues, though. Styled instead of UI integration (I can understand this though, they are aiming for portability, and this way they don't need to change much from OS to OS). No menu bar, no status bar.

SSL warnings could be more intuitive. Visiting an SSL secured page with an invalid certificate does not render the address bar yellow, and there is no lock icon -- just a warning icon. Makes it seem like the page is not secure at all, even though it is.

codeflux, it renders way faster for me in Chrome than it does in a vanilla install of Firefox.
 
I am amazed by how it uses multiple cores. Here is a test I did to see the difference this makes:

-I opened up Core Temp to see the load on my CPU cores (quad core).
-I then opened FF and loaded u all of my hardware sites at one time in tabs (which is a lot of sites). This made only one of my cores go to 100%.
-Then, I opened up Chrome and did the same thing. I saw all of my cores light up.

It would seem it really does treat each tab as a separate application. This is huge, to me, as I have become very interested in Cloud computing and running applications from the web. I think this browser is a big piece of this puzzle.

Here is the cartoon that Google has put out to explain Chrome:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8UsqHohwwVYC&printsec=frontcover#PPP1,M1

I really like what they are doing here. Colour me impressed. :eek:
 
Oh, addendum to my previous post, I just noticed that there is no major need for a status bar. It appears when you hover over a link.

Still, there isn't much to see (though there is some amazing stuff behind-the-scenes). I'm eager to see upcoming versions, hopefully with a better UI and maybe a plugin system.
 
Ok, so why can't it do RSS feeds? I get 99% of my tech news from RSS feeds... If you search the online help for Chrome RSS has 0 results... How would you overlook something 90% of web pages have?

*shrug*
 
I have it installed (CHSI 16/1 Blast service) and I'm cruising on [H] with it (and I'm sending this reply via it). It's an okay alternative browser (default is IE8B2), but I don't expect it to displace IE at this point.
 
In XP 32 is seems to be faster then FF. I haven't run into any problems yet, but I need to use it for awhile to find any problems. I'll use it for a couple of days and see how it goes.
 
It's going to stay on machine at the very least purely for the "create new application" function - makes Gmail feel like a real desktop application, and it's speedier than Outlook too! For me this is really revolutionary.

Otherwise, I do like what they've done - a history sidebar would be nice. Otherwise it's really fast and easy to use, just feels better than Firefox. Need a couple downloading-related extensions to be released and then I'm set. Just like Google to release a stable product as a beta - now if only the game industry could the same rofl.

And anyways, for the time being, it's geekier than Firefox - installed on way too many normal people's computers to be the status symbol it used to be.
 
can't edit over here

and also, I like the Vista-like look it gives me in XP =)
 
so is it the safari killer we've all been looking for? :p

i'll be sticking to firefox3/IE7 thanks.
 
Only get the AJax interface in my ISP's webmail. Also, can only launch logmein remote control in screenshot mode.

Works well for general browsing though
 
It seems to be noticeably faster on my PC. Running XP, I'll have to give it a shot on Vista tomorrow when I get to work. Only odd thing is, I cannot scroll while holding down the middle mouse button.
 
I just wish i could hold down the middle mouse button and scroll, or have new objects/windows/images open up in a new window instead of a tab. Did i miss an option somewhere?
 
It's lightweight and quick. Yes, at first some things may be slower than Firefox but Chrome also doesn't have any cache filled in yet. Give it some time. Very nice!
 
Its faster than IE for me. I have yet to see any issues, and its a whole lot less complicated than IE8.
 
Chrome loads up some websites faster for me, but not all. And there are many little things about it that I don't like - mainly bookmark/navigation related things
 
Ok, so why can't it do RSS feeds? I get 99% of my tech news from RSS feeds... If you search the online help for Chrome RSS has 0 results... How would you overlook something 90% of web pages have?

*shrug*

It's the first public release, get real. :) In time all the features common to the most popular browsers will be added, I'm quite certain of that. But it's beta, and really in some respects it's highly alpha but most stuff that matters for websurfing is there, and works just fine, and will only get better as it develops.

There's only so much that Google can do in a lab with a small number of developers on such a project. If it's truly going to grow - and this is just the first step towards a true GoogleOS or something of that nature - people have to use it and comment on it, point out bugs when noted, and contribute.

So use it, contribute, and watch it grow.
 
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