Initial thoughts on Google Chrome | The Hickensian

When I wrote the last post, Google Chrome seemed like vaporware, but just as I hit publish, a release time was announced for later that day. Now that I’ve had a chance to have a play with the beta, here’s a brain dump of initial reactions:

It’s fast and nimble. In a Camino way.
It looks like a Fisher Price browser. Simplicity is good, but the style is very child-like, and it makes me worry about the OS X version* (Update: I think the Fisher-priceness is more of an XP issue, it looks much better on Vista). I thought the tab icons were nicely executed though:
The location bar search is much better than I thought – giving solid URLs rather than just a ‘search Google for X’ option. For example, typing ‘Jeremy Ke’ brings up ‘Adactio.com’.
It doesn’t look as if the ‘drawing layer’ in Chrome is quite up to scratch yet. It shows my naivety that I though such things were all part and parcel of Webkit, but it seems not. Text-shadow and border-radius in particular are broken.
It does include the Webkit Web Inspector, so right-clicking reveals the familiar ‘Inspect Element’ command.
I mentioned yesterday about the problem of multiple tabs, and lo, it was a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a beta, yadda, yadda.
The ‘New Tab’ view is more useful than I thought it would be, with it’s inclusion of history and recently bookmarked and closed tabs.
It does allow the use of other search engines, which is a good sign.

It’s a fairly promising start, but it feels more like a browser I would recommend to my parents than use myself. It also worries me using a Google browser, it feels like too many eggs in one basket. Or too many potentially prying eyes?

*Just found out that Mike Pinkerton, the Camino lead is working on the OS X version as we speak. I feel more hopeful about the OS X UI now.