Test Drive

For about a week I’ve been trying out the new Google Chrome.  Don’t know what that is? Yeah I didn’t either until I saw the commercial for it on Hulu….again and again.  Don’t know what Hulu is? That’s your loss.

So here is what I think about the new Google browser wether you agree, disagree or already know everything I’m about to rant or rave about…well whatever.

The Pros:

It looks good and the toolbar/header thing (you know, all the junk that is stuffed at the top) takes up less space than Firefox so all those annoying sites that you have to scroll down just a smidgen to click “next” aren’t as annoying.

It’s easy to bookmark a site/page.  Just click on the star and presto!

Yes, it does as it claims–it loads pages faster.  Not that I have put a stop watch to it, but it seems to work pretty good for all the blogs I frequent.

It has a bookmark/favorite bar like Firefox. My favorite feature that converted me to Firefox in the first place.

The “home page” opens up to a display of a few of your most visited sites.  So if you just want to go do some of your favorites instead of the same one every time, you have a plate to choose from and you just click on what you want.

It has a “recently closed” list so it’s easier to find what you were looking at before (though I keep forgetting about that feature).

When you start typing a website and the browser recognizes it, you can just click enter and it will go to the site without having to enter the entire address. If you do that in Firefox without tabbing down, well it takes you to a Google search result for “hu” instead of sending you to hulu.com.

The Cons:

The tabs are along the very top where in EVERY OTHER program, there is a header showing what program it is. Thus, I forget or loose sight of the whole tab feature to begin with.  Sorry Google, but you just can’t go and change what Windows has long since established.

The home page.  Good in theory for those who just want to click one of their favorites but for me, a waste.  I mean, isn’t that what the favorite/bookmark bar is for? I want my homepage to be my email. Perhaps this is something I have overlooked and am just too dumb/lazy to figure it out.

You can’t fit as many favorites on the favorites bar.  This is due to the “other bookmarks” and overall lack of squishing of each favorite. I want more at one click, not in a pull down menu.

I. Want. My. Search. Bar. Back.  In Firefox and IE you have this nice little search bar at the top where you can enter something then specify where you want it searched (ie Google, eBay, Amazon, etc).  I really like that feature. Chrome, however, is Google exclusive as far as I can tell.  Yes, you can do a Google search directly in the address field but you cannot specify where to search. It’s a monopoly!

The Hidden Tricks:

To bookmark/favoritize a page/site, just click on the star next to the address.  Nice.

Want to go back to a certain page without hitting the back button 24 times? Click and HOLD the back button will give you a drop down menu of your options for pages to go back to.

Full screen feature.  You can click on the tool icon and go into full screen.  I’m not sure if that exists in other browsers or not as I just discovered that one.

You can import a lot of your stuff like bookmarks from IE or Firefox. Again by clicking on the tool icon in the top right.

So, will I keep using it?  I’ll definitely be waiting for my search bar to be added.  Until then, I’m on the fence.  When you have to check Amazon and eBay daily for prices on certain baby items, it’s just too frustrating to take the extra step to each page to do the search.