Google Chrome: First Impressions

1. It seems like it makes light use of system resources - at first. Whereas my Firefox 3 with 9 add-ons uses about 60MB RAM on open, and 100MB after using it for a while, Google Chrome starts at about 20 MB and goes to about 40 MB after browsing awhile. But then I noticed that, with just 1 Chrome window open, in Task Manager under processes it has 4 instances of chrome.exe listed, using a total of about 92MB currently. So 8MB less than my tricked out Firefox 3, while offering much less functionality.

2. I love how you can drag a tab to make a new browser window. I tried doing this with Firefox and it merely makes a shortcut icon to that page. Hopefully the Mozilla team makes this feature available in a future version of Firefox.

3. The way the default home page / new tab page displays thumbnails of your most visited sites seems really cool. This feature seems a lot less cool, though, after you realize the thumbnails are screenshots of the pages when you last visited them, and are not updated unless you visit them again.

4. There aren't really any options for customizing the user interface, and the arrangement of the bookmarks toolbar, address bar, tab row, and icons. I don't like how the tab row is the top thing, then the address bar, then the bookmark toolbar at the bottom. In fact, this is the exact opposite order that I use in Firefox 3. The one exception to this lack of customizability is the "other bookmarks" button, which you can choose to hide if you want. I see no reason why you'd want to hide this unless you have all your bookmarks on the toolbar, since without the button there's no way to access the rest of your bookmarks. When you click the other bookmarks button, you get a scrollable list, with no option to change it to the more useful sidebar Firefox (and even IE7 & IE8) uses.

5. If you click the tool icon you can view your history and downloads, both of which open in their own tab. Again, the sidebar Firefox uses for viewing your history, and the small separate window for your downloads is much more convenient since you can view a web page at the same time.

6. About the memory usage, I just found that if you right click above the tabs, one of the options is task manager, which turns out to be a report on Chrome's memory usage, including each process. It lists 5 processes now, confirmed with Windows task manager: 1 for the browser, 1 for Shockwave, and 3 for tabs. It also lists a summary of Firefox 3's memory usage (I'm writing this in Firefox), which is currently using a nearly identical amount of RAM: 76,303k for Chrome, 76,204k for Firefox. That's actually pretty cool that it has a separate process for the browser and each tab and plugin. That way if one of them crashes, you don't lose the whole shebang.

7. The lack of add-ons is a dealbreaker. After using Firefox for the past few years, and the luxury of add-ons existing for just about anything you'd want your browser to do, I don't think I could ever switch to a browser without similar options. This is only made worse by Chrome's lack of built-in user interface customization options.

Overall, Google Chrome is disappointing. It seems like it's somewhere inbetween Internet Explorer and Firefox, and a lot closer to the IE side. I normally use Firefox for just about all my browsing, and usually only use IE to get updates to XP, so I don't think I'd ever have a reason to use Chrome.