Chrome is Google’s recently unveiled entry to the browser market, purported to make the web “faster, safer and easier”.

The beta is available for you to play with (on Vista and XP only at the moment, Mac and Linux users will have to wait) from this site. So is it a winner? Can the web heavyweight’s new offering really take out Firefox as king of the browser ring?

Download and Installation

First things first; an excellent virtual unboxing is what you’d expect from Google software, and Chrome doesn’t disappoint. Download and installation is rapid and efficient, with the only blip coming when Firefox had to be closed to allow bookmark and history download. This is achieved painlessly and everything seems to have been imported correctly. After a default search provider was picked, it was straight to the meat and potatoes.

Look and feel

Initial impressions of how the browser looks, even at this early stage are good. Minimalism is the order of the day. The tab bar is promoted to the top of the window, with each having its own URL bar and navigation links. This seems to have been a key UI focus of the team judging by Google’s promotional comic (Which can be found here). The tab system doesn’t actually seem all that different from the Firefox system (aside from switched places) upon initial inspection, but a few things come to mind.

Getting the tabs to the top means that the window header is removed. Whilst this is great for those looking for more webpage real-estate, it means that should a large number of tabs be open in the same window, the full page title will be obscured for good (though the tooltip on the tab can be used).

One thing I’m not a fan of from an aesthetic perspective is the black triangle in the top left. Perhaps this should be filled in?

I do see the logic in shifting the tabs upwards though; it gives the tabs themselves greater weight and I can see it catching on. What would be interesting in the future is adding web page specific tools to the url bar underneath to further enrich the web apps Google are gunning for.

The tab bar does seem a touch buggy; Windows occasionally flicks a header of its own on the window, making all tabs other than the active one invisible. I expect these will be addressed in future updates though.

Another thing that’s missing is the permanent status bar at the base of the page. When the mouse is placed over a link, a bar does appear showing the target, and the same bar shows data transfer information during loading. I do think this is a clever move on the whole; eliminating the bar works for most users. However, I would like to have it as a permanent option if necessary, particularly for the progress bar.

“Tearing away” tabs into their own windows works satisfyingly well. When browser windows aren’t maximised however, the blue border at the top is rather ugly and too large. Remove it, please. The blue colour is also very XP, very Fisher-Price. Make it customisable, with a less garish default.

Animations are attractive and unobtrusive. Good work here. Simple it may seem, but the logo is also pretty classy.

User Interface

The user interface, is, as promised, clean and efficient, taking a trick or two from IE7 to hide menu bars by default (I also use the hide menubar extension in Firefox). Buttons are sleek, with a slight gradient added to the url bar itself.

The bookmarks toolbar is large for a user coming from the smart bookmarks extension for firefox, so this I instantly hid (though it reappears promptly when a new tab is opened). Hopefully Google (or an addon) will stick on a similar functionality in the future.

Bookmarks are added in a way virtually identical to Firefox, with the star icon arbitrarily on the left rather than the right. There is indeed a ‘Go’ button unlike Firefox (which desperately needs it back).

A few things are notable in their absence. You won’t see a home button for instance, which really does hit its usability in my opinion at the moment. The toolbars aren’t remotely customisable, either, which was a bit of a downer.

New tabs are opened with a shifting new tab button a la Opera/IE (or with the standard middle clicks). One thing I miss from my firefox extensions is scrollwheel support to switch tabs. This I find mindbogglingly useful, and would like to see it included in browsers as a standard feature.

The url bar with its so called “Omnibox” works well, and since I’m pretty much forced to use it, it had better do. It seems to have recognised where to go in most situations, working similarly to Firefox’s “Awesome bar”. One thing I like is the search suggestions, which the Firefox version doesn’t give unless the dedicated search box is used. There are some situations where it’s too clever for its own good though, such as when I’d like to get to a .com page rather than the .co.uk page associated with it.

Google’s default homepage is nice, drawing heavily on Opera’s Speed Dial for inspiration. It’s far more automated, though, with virtually no user control. It also doesn’t seem to always be correctly recognising which sites I visit most. Plenty of Amazon visits later, it still hadn’t popped up. There should certainly be some manual way of controlling what does or does not show up.

Google also needs to allow control over the sensitivity of the scroll wheel with respect to webpages; The default setting hits about 5 lines at a time, which is more than I’d like.

Web Apps and Performance

Wow. Here is one aspect that had me seriously impressed. Pages load lightning fast, and are pretty damn responsive as well. Javascript runs super quick. Two thumbs up. It looks like Google’s ground up approach has paid off here. Pages seem quicker and more responsive than Firefox 3 or Opera.

Flash also works well for games sites, although for some unexplained reason, Youtube videos are impossible to view (appearing with a ‘sorry, this video is available’ notice for all videos, working fine in Safari/Firefox/Ie7/Opera). Big error here on Google’s part, hopefully this will be sorted out sooner rather than later. Metacafe and similar were functional.

Gmail is also very quick, reflecting the pace of the new Javascript engine. Google maps works well.

(It’s worth noting here that some have had issues with WYSIWYG editors).

Features

Not a lot to say here really; There’s nothing new that you can actually do with Chrome that you can’t do with any other browser (give or take a few extensions). Incognito mode is nice, and very necessary for the amount of browsing info that appears to be collected over time.

The browser preferences at the moment are sadly very limited, with a pretty rigid system enforced for the time being. More options required.

The inspect element feature is a very handy tool for web developers, and seems to have been pretty well implemented. The yellow highlights for divs don’t always seem to work, however.

Downloads work a lot like the downloadstatusbar extension for firefox, and are even snazzier visually. A way to make it reappear easily after closing it is necessary.

Stability

Whilst some seem to have had multiple crashes, that hasn’t been the case for me. If a tab crashes, only it and its associated process need go down (as you can test by killing one of the number of chrome.exe processes active with multiple tabs open). It seems to be using fewer combined resources than a comparable firefox window.

Generally, stability doesn’t seem terrible for the very first beta. All sorts of issues with the tab bar though, with tabs and/or the close button disappearing upon random usage.

Verdict

Google Chrome Beta has had a fairly decent start. Visually quite impressive on the whole, but more importantly, very, very quick. Beta bugs galore and a few puzzling design choices mean that in its current state it’s no match for Firefox yet though. Solutions for these issues and a solid bank of extensions are needed. With these in place, it’s quite easy to see Chrome becoming the browser of choice. The basics are in place, and combined with the apparent affinity of Chrome for web apps, it should be able to lay a formidable challenge to the rest of the browser crowd once the rough edges have been smoothed over.