Does this mean it’s a bad browser. Absolutely not. It’s certainly better than Internet Exploder and when it was working, it seemed to render a little faster than Firefox (perceptual, no hard evidence of this). Chrome’s UI is far better than IE and even a leg up on Firefox (at least the default theme for the Windows version). It will definitely take some wind out of Firefox’s usage numbers.

Until I get a new machine and/or fresh install of the OS, I’m going to stick with Firefox for everyday use. Waiting for my machine to wake up from a Chrome coma while shopping at the Gap is seriously hindering my productivity at work!

Update 1: I just got around to installing Chrome at home and there must be something on my work machine conflicting with Chrome. It’s considerably faster on this machine (AMD Athlon 64×2 4200+ / 2GB Ram / XP SP3) and doesn’t experience the hangs like my work machine does. Very queer. I wish my work machine wasn’t such a turd.

Update 2: I don’t know what exactly Chrome does behind the scenes, but I hear an awful lot hard drive activity when it’s the only application running. Interesting.

I use a Mac at home, so I’m used to Safari. In fact, until I recently started a side job, I used Safari exclusively for about a year. It’s fast to start up and fast to render. It has some developer tools built in so figuring out which styles apply to which elements is easy to decipher. Safari on Windows isn’t quite as quick as Safari on Mac. At least, it’s not on my work machine; an aging Pentium 4 with a measly 2GB of memory. This is the one thing kills Safari for Windows for me. I tried using it as a daily browser, but it was painfully slow on this machine. I think what kills it is Apple’s desire to make the application look like OS X and not Windows. Yes, it looks one million times better than windows, but at what cost? I’d rather it run fast on this machine than look pretty. It’s funny how Apple is somewhat hypocritical in this respect as they have strict guidelines for applications built for their own OS.

I digress…

So far (and this is a very short testing period) it’s a very fast and responsive application. It starts right up and renders quickly too. Its interface is minimal and clean yet functional (like most Google apps). It looks like it’s kind of modeled after IE7′s interface in that it does’t have a menu bar like most Windows applications. There are two icons to the right of the “OmniBox” (Chrome’s URL/search box all rolled into a single field); one to handle things like cut/copy/paste, new tab/window, etc and one for global features like options, history, and downloads. Of course there’s the obligatory back, forward and reload buttons and a place for your bookmarks, standard with any browser.

Tabs can be moved around easily for ordering and can be dragged completely out of the current container to create it’s own new Chrome window (a handy feature Firefox doesn’t support out of the box).

For developers, it has the same developer tools found in Safari. You can view source, debug JavaScript, monitor the JavaScript console, inspect elements on a page (which brings up a similar window to Safari’s). You can also view a Task Manager related to Chrome and it’s tabs that shows you how much memory and CPU are being used for each tab/window you have open. It even tells you how much memory is being used for any installed plugins. The Task Manager allows you to kill specific tabs if they are misbehaving as well.

I’m going to use it as my default for a while to see how it stacks up on a daily basis. I am optimistic at the moment, but I did notice some system hangs though those could be related to this massive pile of Java code running under Weblogic 8… which is an entirely different story.