Google chrome: chromed or bombed September 6, 2008

Hi!!

It has been a bit toooooo long that i have come up with a blog entry. And if you ask me to be brutally honest while giving the reasons for it, I will say “A fair mix of me being busy and me being laZZZZy!”.

Ok, coming back to what this blog entry is meant for. For all the google worshippers, google fanatics and google lovers, it is a time to jump in joy as google has again hit the headlines with a bang! The much rumoured and talked about google web browser is finally out and what it aims at is to topple the yet-undisputed-and-crowned-king-browser Internet Explorer. Yipppeee ! (I am among the worshippers )

The evaluation as a normal end user by me will start a bit late in the entry, lets first give you all the info about the web browser. To download the application on your Windows system, click  the link and follow the instructions on the page opened. Keeping up with its tradition, google has launched the beta version, which means that this is not the final product but this is more or less what the final product will look like. To read more about chrome, watch its videos and read the leaked comic book (which forced google to release the beta version early) , follow this link.

So, once you are done with installing chrome, open the chrome web browser and it will very neatly import all the relevant data from you default web browser (Internet Exploer or Firefox). Once, this is done, the window that opens up gives you the all pleasant google-feeling which is: things looks very simple and classic with no fuss and mess in and around the window.

Here comes the evaluation or call it my views on the first hand experience with chrome.

Lets look at things thatI liked about chrome:

• Looks classic and elegant, is not filled with millions of options to tweak the browser and sticks to the feel that google products are normally associated with.
• The welcome page is quite gooooOOOd. The page is divided into frames that show most visited links with their snapshots, your recent bookmarks, tabs you have closed recently and a google search bar! Whooof! Quite a stuff but all are decently placed and the snapshots are well suited if you do not surf too much of adult stuff to make it part of your most visited links!
• There is an incognito mode of browsing. Incognito mode which means ‘With your identity concealed ‘ is also called private browsing mode. Using this option, whatever you do on the internet, any information (browse history, search history, cookies) won’t be preserved by the browser on the system you are working on. However, the bookmarks you create and files you download while browsing in this mode will be preserved. And all the mischievous heads, don’t get too elated! All the information, which the visiting link’s server or your Internet Service provider wants to store about you, will still get stored. So, do not think that you can use your naughty head to do some cognizable cyber crime and you won’t get caught
• If one of you browser tab misbehaves or crashes, the whole browsing windows does not crash. So, if you are editing a mail on one tab, writing a blog on another and watching a video using third tab and for some damn reason, all of a sudden tab on which you were watching a video crashes! Do not worry, the whole window is not supposed to pay the price for this untoward beaviour by ‘a tab’. So, the rest of your to-be-edited and unsaved stuff are not touched/harmed by this tab-crash! Cool Stuff, isn’t it!
• You can searh from the address bar (the place where you write the web page address you want to visit) itslef. So, if you write India on the address bar and press Enter, it will automatically consider it as a search string and show the search results using the search engine you have set(google by default).
• The tabbed browsing experience in chrome, is a bit different. Now, apart from the normal tabbed browsing which we have experienced in Safari or Firefox or Internet Explorer, we can even drag and drop a tab from one chrome window to another.

Now, lets look at the other side of the coin:

• It has just been two days and people all around the world (even normal end users like us) knows how to instantanously crash google chrome! For all who still do not know it, let me spread the fire
  Type anythting followed by a : (colon) and a % (modulus) and chrome will peacefully crash!! e.g. type googlechrome:% and press enter to see the rest of the magic.
• They are creating a separate process for every tab and every window you open in chrome, which makes it a very heavy application once we have something like 5 chrome windows with 2 tabs in each opened. For all the computer nerds, the way they have developed chrome can be briefly understood by following this link. For the rest, let me clear it with an example:
           Consider a case where there is a constant supply of biscuits (a stack of ‘n’ at a time) and you need to put all the stacks of incoming biscuits in the  biscuit jar(s) you have. Now, what happens in case of other popular web browsers (like firefox or safari or internet explorer) is, when ever their current jar is filled and it cannot accommodate the incoming stack of biscuits, these browsers increases the size of their jar and accommodate the incoming biscuits (Yes! you can do that in technical world). The disadvantage using these browsers is, if the biscuits are being consumed, and no more biscuits are to be put in the jars, the jar size is not decreased and hence a lot of jar space gets wasted.(I hope you all understood it till here:) ).However, in case of google chrome, they create a new jar for every incoming biscuits stack.This way, every time a biscuit set is consumed, that jar is destroyed and hence they do not waste the jars if the requirement is not there. But! But! But! A major disadvantage of creating a new jar for every incoming stack of biscuits is, you consume a lot more jars and hence you waste/compromise a lot of your time and speed creating new jars.
  Lesson learnt from the story: Creating a new jar is a heavier task than increasing the size of an already available jar in the technical world.
  If you still haven’t understood it, read it again and even after another read you cannot understand it, consider the above paragraph as pure shit and understand that opening too many tabs and windows on google chrome makes your system real slow. It even made my Intel core Duo desktop with 1 GB RAM behaves sluggish. This is some real big issue and I believe they will definitely sort this out before they come up with a full n final release.
• This hurried release is only confined to Windows users, so Mac and Linux users need to wait a bit more before chrome is released for a wider range of Operating Systems.

My final verdict: Its good to see Google enter into the web browser market and they have done reasonably good with chrome beta. However, a lot still needs to be done with respect to performance before it can jettison or outshine the positions of Internet Explorer or Firefox.

That’s it from my side for chrome. Adios!