More to Like About Chrome

The more I played with Chrome last night, the more I liked it. 

I started out with just plain browsing and kept trying to find progressively more complicated websites to see if I could make it crash or even fail to render the same way that it did in other browsers.  No problems could be forced upon it upon normal use.  There was one project that wouldn’t display properly from our board’s website but it doesn’t display in Firefox or Flock either so I didn’t fret too much.

I then started to mess around with things that really intrigued me.

There is a developer menu and guess what?  Chrome has its own task manager.  Chrome’s claim is that each tab has its own process.  So, it’s a fun activity to break off the Chrome Task Manager and then load and reload pages to watch the CPU count for each tab.  If you like watching numbers and seeing processes, it’s interesting and gives you more insight as to just what is going on. 

So, I spent some time watching the processes and then read the fine print…  If you have other browsers open, Chrome will even show you their usage as well!  I like a challenge and more info so I did.

It’s a nice head to head non-scientific comparison but interesting none the less.  Chrome seems fast, but the question is always “how fast”?  The folks at ZDNET did some benchmark testing.  Their results would confirm what you see visually.  This is fast.

Tabbed browsing is cool, but there sometimes are needs that can’t be resolved in tabs.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have two pages side by each so that you can compare resources, or even when you web developing to see a before and after.  When I’m working with Dreamweaver, I will typically open one in one browser and the other in another.

Chrome makes it far easier.  The tabs tear off.  So, just grab a tab and pull it to a blank area of your desktop and you have another instance of Chrome to look at.  And, nicely enough, if you drag the tear-off back to the original view, it slides nicely back into place.  This is very cool and incredibly helpful.  I found myself using this technique over and over again rather than flipping to a tab and back.

I’m not a total convert yet.  Chrome’s clean look is a huge difference from my normal view of Flock when I fire it up.  It serves as a reminder that I’ve become so accustomed to my weather in the status bar, the built-in blogging, delicious bookmarks, my Media bar, …

Yet, there’s something strangely compelling about Chrome that keeps me coming back to use it.  It’s been an interesting experience overnight just playing around with it.  Its use has been intuitive and the performance is living up to the hype.  More to come, I’m sure.

Social Bookmarks: