Ted Chan

Well, like many people I heard all the buzz about google chrome and wanted to check it out for myself. So I hopped on over and read the comic about google chrome that started it all.

It’s a pretty interesting format and way of showing the functions of google’s browser, google chrome. I think it did a decent job of going through the processes and reasoning why they had setup the browser the way they did.

A couple of things I had researched after reading the comic was about the webkit. A lot of people were under the impression that the webkit was from apple, but actually apple had been using an open source code that can be found here that grew out of the KHTML and KDE open source projects.

Google Chrome is an open source web browser. After using it for a couple of days, I can say that it opens gmail and other javascript dependent web email apps like yahoo mail and even hotmail a lot quicker than firefox (and IE the occasional times that I’ve used it). I didn’t have a very scientific method of testing it, but it was just from my observation and interacting with gmail, grand central, yahoo mail and a few other sites that I frequently visit.

I do like the “most visited” view when I open a new tab. It saves me time in going to the websites that I usually use the most… namely gmail and yahoo mail.

I started missing some of the plugins that I use often with FireFox while using Chrome; but the speed and flexibility for Chrome has given me some high hopes to look forward to in new revisions.

The plugins that I use seem to see the most of in FireFox (and I just recently reloaded my computer and firefox plugins…so I’m a little more conscious about it than I normally would be) are All-in-One Gestures, Better Gmail 2 and Foxmarks.

I have played around with other web browsers in the past see my thoughts on flock here. But I usually end up going back to my trusty stand by of FireFox. Although it was rough going for a little while right after FireFox 3.0 came out and a lot of the plugins that I had used hadn’t been updated yet. But, we’re back to the good old trusty FireFox.

For now, I’ll be using google chrome mostly for checking email since it seems pretty snappy and fast at that. And I do like the fact that I can move the tabs around or even pop them out to a new window.

One of the other things that I noticed, and it might just be on my system is if I have google chrome open for awhile at the same time that I’m browsing with FireFox; occassionally I’ll have FireFox lock-up and not be able to close my tabs. I’m not sure if this is just because I had too many tabs open in FireFox or whatever the reason (it also usually starts to happen when FireFox starts to go over 100k in mem usage.

I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts as I continue to use google chrome and test it out on various web sites.