Google Chrome is the latest product from the search giant that everybody is buzzing about.  It’s a new web-browser with a handful of new tricks.  Separate process for each page open to improve stability of the application as a whole, floating tabs, and a sort-of interesting main tab page that gives you thumbnails of your most visited sites are the new tricks.

I tried the Google Chrome very briefly yesterday for about 5 minutes.  That’s about all it took me to decide I wasn’t going to switch.  I’ll grant you that Chrome, like every other applet from Google, is still in beta and will most likely get better with time.  First thing I noticed and immediately irritated me was the lack of a home page icon.  This bugs me when I use Safari and it still bugs me when I use Chrome.  If there is a way to place one back on my tool bar it was not immediately obvious to me. 

That leads me to my second point, the lack of configurability.  There is something to be said for simple applications in an effort to make them easier to use.  Google appears to have stripped a lot of the configurability found in other browsers.  Most noticeable for me was the disabling of third party cookies, a security feature that I’ve become attached to in Firefox.

Third and final point, I actually found the browser slower.  Not to the point where it was completely unusable.  Using an Athlon 2800+ system running a XP install that’s about a month old connected to a 10 megabit connection, Chrome was just slow enough to be able to watch it render a page.  Firefox on the same system renders them instantly.  There could just be something with my setup slowing it down, but that excuse doesn’t go very far when you are creating a multiplatform application.

For me that’s 3 strikes and I’m out.  Now there is no reason I couldn’t expect to see all of these gripes on a future update.  And I’ll be perfectly happy to try the next version when its released.  But the one or two new features, like the floating tabs, are not quite enough to convince me to switch.  If you want to make me switch my browser, I’m going to need everything I can do in my current browser, plus something outstanding to really get my attention.

I also don’t really care for the baby blue.