Now that I have had more time to spend on playing around with Google, there are a handful of things that I can see working well for them in comparison to the other browsers.

I noticed that opening new tabs in Google now function similarly to how FF does now, where a new tab will open up at the very end of the set of tabs open.  From what I remembered initially, a new tab will open up next to the current open tab available, which I liked a lot.  I’m not fond of tabs being opened at the very end, as I usually have multiple tabs open simultaneously, and having to scroll to the tab I opened can be a pain.  With FF, to offset having to scroll to view the tab I just opened, I can just click on the FF tab showcase plugin to view all the tabs, and I’m unsure if there are similar plugins for Chrome.

I do like how, on an existing tab, if you right-click a link and select open in a new tab, it goes directly next to that existing tab that you clicked from.  FF/IE doesn’t function that way, and that sucks.

When I sign in to my web-based emails, I love how Chrome has my login highlighted and ready for me to enter my information.  It beats having JUST that blinking text line, which doesn’t help much on both FF and IE.  However, I’m still seeing some quirks on my yahoo account when I access it on Chrome.  Not as much as I have seen before, but still… something to think about.

I do like how Google has the recently viewed sites at the very first opening of the browser, which I think is very helpful if you don’t have an existing home page.  Again, it reminds me of a plugin that I have for FF.

I don’t like how I have to hold down the “back” button to get the history of the sites I have browsed.  FF and IE both have that dropdown arrow that lists my visited sites, which I can just click instead of having to hold a button.  I think from a user standpoint it makes you work harder for what you want to do versus providing the user as much ammo as possible to do little work in order to be more productive.

Downloading files can also be somewhat mundane with Chrome.  Chrome’s download functionality, while it does seem seemless when downloading individual files, does not seem to be user-friendly when it comes to collecting all the downloaded files simultaneously.  You have to open up each download file window or double-click on that file within the download file window to be able to access that specific file.  FF has a download window which stores all downloaded files and items for you, which provides all downloaded files in one location versus multiple windows.  I have not yet tried downloading multiple files within multiple tabs to find out if I have to click on each individual tabs to get to the download file window, but that is something I would definitely investigate.

I don’t believe that Chrome will take over IE or FF anytime soon, but give it a few more years and I can see that there may be some shift in the browser market share.

I’ve been playing around with Google’s Chrome browser for a while, and have had some cool things that I liked and others that I’m still getting used to.  Nevertheless, here are my two cents on Chrome.

The Positives

First off, it seems very fast and responsive when conducting searches, and even saw some very tight functions on display responses when conducting these searches.  Automation on meta tag descriptions and keywords were, in my opinion, faster than Mozilla’s Firefox and IE 6 and 7 (I have not yet tested IE8, at least on the laptop I’m using LOL).

Second, the simplicity of the design felt like I never left Google; rather, it showed that the design’s “simple” features did not present itself to be the forefront representative of its browser capabilities, but rather accentuated the “speak softly but carry a big stick” mentality.

Third, I was surprised that it was able to upload most of my Firefox bookmarks on my laptop, and I was hoping to see Google being able to upload my Foxmarks account information based on the FF bookmarks.  While it was a good thing, sadly enough, there were limitations to the upload process and the final results yielded so-so marks.

The Negatives

In light of this event, to which Google is now supposedly trying to take over Microsoft’s browser market share, I played around Facebook with some good ol’ fashioned MobWars and found some interesting issues that came along while playing it.

I encountered errors after errors on attacking other mobs, and ultimately, I would have to use the back button or my backspace button to go back to the main MobWars home page.  I’ve seldom had this issue before, and it was not as often nor as frequent.  Other buttons to vamp up my mob were stalled with error messages and load time, which I felt like it was more of the server-side issues and not necessarily Chrome’s servers to begin with.  So I left that application to the home page and checked out some new pics, and it didn’t take long for my Facebook app to go haywire, stalling every other pic and sending me back to the home page.  Some of the notifications I have received were also hard to open, when it was working at a fairly normal rate in Firefox, which is usually fast.

My Yahoo email address was also screwy in performance when accessed through Chrome.  Yes, how ironic that Yahoo email is going to crash in a Google app LOL, yet mine hardly crashes at all.  If anything, it’s my hotmail account that kills me.

I also heard of other people who have used this open source browser, and found issues with JavaScript and Captchas.  And as I am writing to you at midnight, I am still thinking whether or not I should stay up a little more to see if any of my Google-based apps are having issues in Chrome.  But, since I have been sleeping at 2 every morning for the past couple of weeks, I think writing about testing other apps will be for another day.