Things I Like About Google Chrome

Since launching in 2008, Google's foray into the web browser market was surprisingly successful. In a matter of months, Google Chrome already ranked third among popular browsers following Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It already overtook long time browser "cult classics" Opera and Safari.

My default favorite is Firefox but I do have the latest Google Chrome version installed, which acts as my secondary browser for a number of situations. Over the years, I've come to like this free web browser for some of its unique features. Here are come things that I've come to like with Google Chrome.

Its Fast!

Faster than IE and Firefox for the most part anyway. Probably because, straight out of the box, it has less of the stuff you would expect from the other two browsers. However, once you start installing some add-ons then any variance in speed among these web browsers might seem negligible for the average surfer.

Personally, I find Chrome to be a tad more perky than Internet Explorer and Firefox on most sites. For one thing, IE takes forever to start-up. The Google Chrome browser on the other hand jumps right in to handle your browsing needs. Chrome boasts of a faster javascript engine called V8 that allows for rich internet applications (RIA) to perform better. In fact, Google Chrome was intended to support emerging technologies for the Web.

Take the Chrome experiments for example. Click on any of the demonstrations and observe the fluidity and speed of the animations for each experiment. I compared the site's performance across all three best browsers and Chrome.exhibited flawless display. Firefox was able to handle the applications but the display was noticeably jittery. In comparison, Internet Explorer had to install the Google Chrome Frame plug-in before being able to run the demo. Although slow at first, once it loaded, IE was able to run the experiments comparable as with Chrome.

Try out these experiments and see for yourself. They're actually quite cool!

• Browser Ball - Fling a ball through different application windows.
• Canvas Cycle - Amazing artwork showing flowing motions.

Web Application Shorcuts

Google seems to be geared towards a future where all of the computing universe is entirely in the Web; and Chrome is designed to be the browser of choice for that foreseeable future. Document processing applications, image processing applications, video and audio editing applications, and so on... everything that we are able to do on our computers through individual stand-alone software will be done online (some things already are).

With Chrome, if you create an "application shortcut" on your desktop for a website - for example Gmail - clicking on that shortcut will open up a special window that only shows that website. No browser menus, no bookmarks, no Omnibar (i.e. Chrome's URL address bar), no tabs. It's as if you had Gmail installed right in your PC.

Chrome may be sticking out like a sore thumb in the battle of the browsers but it's probably because it wasn't meant to run in Windows. Clearly, Google has its eyes set on making Chrome the cornerstone of its new operating system in a bid to redefine the entire computing experience.

But that's another story.