Some among us remember the big browser wars in the late 90′s between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Research suggests that a second period of browserwars has started in 2003, and still is going on. [ref01]

Today Google entered the battlefield, by opening up the beta to the big public of their webbrowser called Google Chrome. After installing the software, my bookmarks are simply imported from Mozilla Firefox (the current default webbrowser).

The design is simple, some will call it bare, but you have al the functionality you need in the main screen. So let’s describe the userinterface as effective or productive. However it’s not only the design that counts, but the whole browsing-experience.

After I entered an URL, the browser reacts very fast and loads the pages at lightspeed. Every tab embeds a single process, and this seems to positively influence the browser-speed as well as the overall stability of the program.  However not simply covinced I did some additional tests, with the most important of my browser usage scenario’s:

• Google Chrome is fully compatible with the WordPress backoffice, so no problems with online publishing.
• The digitial learning environment from the University of Twente, also seems to work seamlessly with this browser. This environment I visit quite often, since I have a list with links to research articles in there.
• Youtube also works like a charm, no problems with the video streams.
• Online banking with the Rabobank. The online banking application works very fast and without any errors.

At first sight the Google Chrome browser is at this point pretty basic, so don’t expect widely available add-ons like this is the case in Firefox. What I can conclude is that Google Chrome outerperforms the other browsers in terms of speed, and that search is quicker due to a single address / search bar. The first impressions are good, but let see how this browser evolves. I would like to recommend reference 2 and 3 where a lot of features and idea’s of the development process are listed !! So give it a try and download it over here.

Reference list:

1. WIKIPEDIA:  Browser Wars
2. GOOGLE:  Background development info on Google Chrome
3. GOOGLE:  Google Chrome features explained
4. DOWNLOAD:  Google Chrome (beta) for Windows

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