Google's Chrome

For those of you who don't follow Internet news, last month Google launched a new browser based on the Webkit engine used by Apple's Safari browser. Lots of people tried it, the launch produced amazing numbers, however, most decided it wasn't ready to be their basic browser. Websites that report on the browers that access their site, reported that lots of people tried it early, but the numbers went way down within a week as most people went back to their original browsers. That's what I did.

The Bad

• No bookmarks  [ Corrected October 30 2008 - Fellow Computer Consultant Lis Baccigaluppi emailed this correction to me: I thought I’d let you know (since I am a huge fan of Chrome) that it does have bookmarks.  There is a little star to the left of the address bar and when you click on that you can create a bookmark – you can also put it wherever you want just like in Firefox and IE. Lis can be contacted at: http:⁄⁄www.techknowsolve.com ]
• Poor control of third party cookies. No site by site control or outgoing control. Thus, there is no control if Paypal redirects you to DoubleClick which sets a cookie and then sends you back. Firefox prevents this. It should be noted that Google owns Doubleclick.
• No encryption of passwords it saves
• Poor control of JavaScript (protection from attacks)
• It installs a process which runs all the time to check for malware and phishing sites. Any process constantly running can cause problems. I used WinPatrol to disable it.
• Consumes huge amounts of memory when many windows are used.

The Good

• Each tab runs as its own process
• Very fast JavaScript execution
• Has an incognito mode (also known as 'private browsing' or 'porn window')
• Tabs can be moved outside the frame. This is very neat. You can drag a tab over to your other monitor (assuming you have two monitors).
• Some sandboxing around processes to prevent crashes in a window from bringing down the entire browser and to restrict processes from writing outside their process. However, third party applications would be able to move outside this restriction.
• Closing individual tabs should return that tab's memory back to the system more efficiently than Firefox or IE.
• Starts up very fast since it doesn't have to check for updates or update its malicious software database (because of the constantly running process).

The Both

• Fast startup. Because it has no add-ons, and because it has a process running all the time to do updating, it starts real quick. Firefox on the other hand, with lots of add-ons, will check each for updates as well as Firefox updates and phishing site protection updates on startup; so it can often start slowly. I would prefer having the add-ons (which I can remove if I like), and not have even more processes running all the time, but, I don't like the slow startup it causes.
• Has had lots of security issues so far, but has been quick to fix them.
• Its speed is pretty average for loading normal pages

The Verdict

Stick with Firefox.