Second Look: Google Chrome

At first I scoffed.  Boy, did I scoff.  I uber-scoffed.  But I've always been a bleeding edge software guy.  I like to dive in early and feel the stinging burn of progress smack me in the forehead.  Thankfully there's virtualization to help ease the pain.  It's my Aloe Vera for the sunburn of crashing alpha and beta products.

Google Chrome really isn't bad.  It renders pretty well actually.  Better than IE8 in native mode for sure.  And it hasn't crashed on me at all (yet).  IE8 Beta 2 was locking up so bad on me that I had to roll back to IE7 (physical box, not a virtual).  Some apps just dont' get their due justice in a virtual environment because there's the tendency to only work part-time in the VM and full time (or more time) in the physical environment.  I have no idea why, but it happens that way very often.  If you run normally inside a VM then forget all that.

First off, there's already enough reviews being posted about Chrome, so I'm not going to slice and dice what it does.  Check out Paul Thurrott's site for more insight on Chrome.  I will say that it's very basic and early in the development.  There are hardly ANY options to tweak at this point.  It's much cleaner with respect to the UI than Firefox 3 and cleaner than IE8 for sure.  The performance is great, renderings are very fast.  No layout quirks so far and I've used it on LinkedIn, Blogger, Hotmail, Microsoft Careers (oops, did I say that?), Yahoo News, Google Reader and Gmail (of course), and Microsoft's Clip Gallery Live.  No problems at all.  Even IE8 won't handle all of those properly (in native mode).  Google Reader won't even work correctly in IE8 when using Compatability View mode.

I'll stick with this for a while longer and see how it goes.