As I was installing and loading up Chrome, my general thought was, “yeah, sure Google, I’ll switch as soon as you can replicate my favorite dozen Firefox plugins.” Fast forward five minutes, and my reaction is, shall we say, mixed.
- This thing is fast. Pages seem to load instantly. It’s a little creepy, but in a good way.
- As much as Firefox 3 brags about it’s smart address bar, Chrome does it one better, auto-searching for actual url’s in real time. Pretty cool.
- It respects my screen real-estate — at the top there’s only a thin window name bar thingy, and in fullscreen in goes away completely. In Firefox I like my status bar so I know where links point when I hover over them. In Chrome the status bar is absent, but when I hover over links their target pops up at the bottom of the screen.
- Generally, there’s no impression of a learning curve — I can just sort of do whatever I need to do.
- Did I mention how friggin FAST it is?
OK, this is a beta, and it’s not all roses — in my first 5 minutes a couple of little bugs have already cropped up. Nothing fatal, though. Maybe there’s even a Flashblock functionality built in here somewhere.
Chrome may not be displacing Firefox as my primary browser yet, but it’s pretty close to displacing Opera as my backup go-to browser.
no help for mac users yet. safari it is…
Um… Firefox seems to work really well on the Mac, no?
BTW, if you’ll forgive a mini-rant, Macs are great, but I am sick and tired of of the lack of skepticism from the users towards the company. Apple Inc. just just SHADY. Oh, and some of their pricing is just outrageous:
$199 for an 8 gig iPhone is fair. $299 for the 16 gig version = $100 for 8 GB of flash memory.
Macbook pricing reveals a $200 difference for a 90 GB upgrade in hard drive space and a switch from white to black.
What kind of suckers do these people take us for?
The suckers that keep flocking to Apple as if it was manna from heaven.
I can’t stand Apple and their arrogance. Ever tried to call their customer support? Don’t get me started. My 5th ipod just gave up the ghost, I’m convinced they make them with a planned obsolescence of two years. (Thankfully everybody believes they make good presents). The iphone pricing is rape indeed. What company gets away with so much?
correct. firefox 3 is fine. i really was just lamenting the inability to be able to try it out.
rule of thumb for 1st wave tech releases (the kind you pay for) is wait… you can get a quality product for less if you just hold out a couple months.