Welcome to our in-depth review of Google Chrome.  In Part 1, we’ll cover installation and startup.

Installation

Download and installation of Google Chrome was a snap.  It took less than two minutes from the time I downloaded until the browser was up and running.  Note that I am running most of my testing inside a VirtualBox Windows XP virtual machine, so there weren’t any bookmarks, history, etc. to import.  I have seen reports that it can take longer with a large history, but my other install on a physical Windows Vista box did not seem to indicate any delays.

Start up

Start up is nearly instantaneous.  The initial install opens two tabs.  The first (pictured above) is the adaptive Google home page.  This is the page that will pop up any time you go home, or when you open a new tab.

Initially, I didn’t think I’d really like this adaptive page very much.  For me, the jury is still out.  It was kind of cool to see my frequent and recent pages in thumbnails after using the browser for a while (minus the privacy implications!).  The recently closed tabs and various search features also may be useful, but once I memorize some of the cool keyboard shortcuts I doubt they’ll be useful.  So far my experience has been that I don’t mind this page, but I don’t really use it much either.

The other start-up tab that Google Chrome opens is a “Welcome to Google Chrome” page.  The very limited set of features Google chose to cover on this page is interesting:

  • One box for everything - this is an incredibly cool feature.  Basically, what would usually be the URL box in previous browsers is a fully adaptive search box that attempts to guess what you want to do.  After using it for most of the afternoon, back in Firefox I find myself starting to type all sorts of nonsense on the URL line.  I’ll touch on this later, but I definitely see why Google included it here.
  • New Tab page - I guess they’re pretty proud of this homepage. I covered that a bit above, but I find it interesting that they’re calling it the “new tab page” rather than the “home page.”
  • Application shortcuts - this one I don’t really get yet. I understand the whole browser as OS thing and I’m totally down with it.  I just don’t get how it’s more efficient to hide the forward and back buttons and the rest of the browser chrome (ha).  For me, this is a “who cares?” - it’s something I stopped doing with javascript at least 5 or 6 years ago, and don’t really care to see again. Yeah, I created a shortcut to Gmail to see if I was missing something.  If I was, I couldn’t figure out what it is (but feel free to let me know in the comments!).

First Problem

When I installed Google Chrome on my main Vista desktop, it picked up all of my Firefox plugins fine - Flash and others “just worked.”

When I went to install Adobe Flash on my testing (virtual) machine, it didn’t pick up Flash, presumably because I don’t have Firefox on that VM.  I downloaded and installed and … nothing happened.  No workie.

It took me a couple of install retries to guess that I needed to close and restart Google Chrome to get Flash working.  This wasn’t too big of a deal for me, but it was definitely the sort of thing that would result in a panicked tech-support call from my mom.

 

 

That’s it for part 1 of our in-depth Google Chrome review.  In part 2, we cover settings and configuration.

Part 2 >>

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