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Google's Chrome web browser is released

Posted September 3rd, 2008 in Applications

As reported yesterday by me here and everywhere else, Google was to launch their new web browser Chrome today which they did. You can download it here: www.google.com/chrome Naturally as with everything Google releases it has the "beta" tag on it...

I downloaded and installed it in a couple of minutes and had a quick play around with it. It has a very minimal and slick interface but given that most people don't even know what a web browser is, is Google really going to get market share from anyone other than people who actually know what a web browser is already? i.e. developers, technos and other assorted nerd types who are already using Firefox, Opera and Safari over Internet Explorer.

Screenshots

I won't post too many screenshots as there will be plenty over the Internet today and I'll look at some more screenshots of some of the features over the next few days. The first screenshot below shows when you launch Google Chrome, the default view is to show a list of "Most Visited" websites with thumbnail images of the pages, and recently added bookmarks. This is similar to Opera when it starts up. It is possible to change this start up behaviour.

The second screenshot below shows searching Google Chrome's history. It shows when you last visited the page, the page title, some text from the page and a thumbnail of the page, which is useful if you're scanning the list because a picture paints a thousand words and all that...

Chrome Crashed

And finally, the third screenshot below shows what happened after I'd visited only a few of the websites I develop to see if they render OK (they did) and checked out a few of the options etc.

I was surprised to see the whole browser crash. My wife had commented while I was installing Chrome that it's probably buggy and unstable, being a new release, and I scoffed at her saying surely not. But sure enough, she may have been right... or maybe I was just unlucky.

Firefox is really good in this respect: when it does crash and you start it up again, you have the option to have all the tabs reopen on the sites you were looking at previously. Unfortunately Chrome doesn't do this.

Other website reviews etc

Not surpisingly, there are news articles and blog posts about Google Chrome all over the place today. Here are a couple of interesting ones that aren't just looking at the features of the new browser:

Portfolio.com asked "Did Google just become too big?" comparing Google with the "old" Microsoft by using its size to muscle into new markets.

Hank Williams on his "Why Does Everything Suck" blog posted "Who cares about Chrome. IE6 Has 25% Market Share" saying that:

"This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited. ... Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind."