Image Courtesy of Gizmodo.com

I’m no software expert, but I thought I’d take Google Chrome for a spin and give a review in lay terms. My credentials? Software glitches and slow load times piss me off. And I’m a sucker for cool features.

First off, Chrome is still in beta, which means the folks at Google haven’t finished putting it together but they’re eager to let intrepid techies try it out—the feedback they get will help them smooth out any glitches for the final (actually, read “official,” as no software release is ever final) version. In anticipation of the initial release, Google released an online comic that described what makes Chrome different from the competition. It’s worth a read for the technologically curious, though it might seem condescending to some users.

I’ve been trying Chrome out for a few days, and I can say it’s discernibly faster than Internet Explorer much of the time. However, I just discovered version 3 of Mozilla Firefox. In a side-by-side comparison (without clocking them), Firefox seemed a bit faster. The pages popped, and when I visited the home page for Barnes & Noble, Firefox was napping at the finish line while Chrome was hung up waiting for a Flash graphic to load and start scrolling across the screen.

On the other hand, Chrome beat Firefox to the punch on a few other pages, so I can’t say for sure which is faster. I can say only that either one is a breath of fresh air after waiting on Internet Explorer for so many years. (As an aside, I do have to wonder why a company that sounds like baby talk and adorns itself in bright primary colors and Sesame Street letters would call its browser Chrome—the browser’s logo is, in fact, green, yellow, and red. For now, the interface is somewhat silvery, but if they give users the option to customize the colors, there won’t be any reason to call it Chrome, at all. But, then, I guess there’s no reason to call its competition Firefox.)

Chrome has what everyone is calling either a “stripped-down” or “minimalist” interface. I’m all about simplicity. The tabs go above the address bar in Google’s browser, which may feel strange at first. But if you hide the bookmarks toolbar (which you can easily bring back by hitting “Cntrl-B”) you get a maximum of browsing space. There’s not even a status bar at the bottom, so it’s all about the Web site. I like the minimalist approach a lot—the Web should be about the Web, without the extra architecture and framing to remind you that you’re inside another program.

Chrome takes this purist approach to the Web site as an online “program” to its logical conclusion by giving you the option to save a page as an application. A link to that site can reside anywhere on your computer, and when you open it up again, it lives in a bare-bones window without any browser controls. Obviously, this works best for online applications like Office Live, Google Docs, or say, a blog. I saved the Pop + Politics dashboard site as an application, and since blogging software has all the necessary navigation tools built directly into the site, there’s no need to ever use a back button or an address bar. I just open it up and treat it like a word processor slash html editor.

Another cool feature not found in other browsers: you can drag and drop the tabs outside the browser. Apparently, each tab operates like an individual browser window. Drag one to the desktop, for instance, and it actually becomes a new window. Drag it back inside the other window, and it becomes a tab again. Is this anything other than a gimmick, really? Supposedly, yes. Because each tab operates on its own, if it fails, one tab closes without crashing the whole browser. I haven’t seen a tab fail yet, so I can’t report on the usefulness of the feature.

And perhaps most interestingly, Chrome has dropped the separate search box in favor of what Google is calling an “omnibar.” You can type an address or a search query into one box, and as you type Google pulls from your favorites, your search history, and a typical Web search to suggest sites in a drop-down box under your text. If you type a few words of natural language and hit Enter, you’ll go to the search results from the engine of your choosing (you preset the default engine…Google politely asks whether you’d like to keep it as the default when you first install and run Chrome). If you type a full address and hit Enter, you’ll be taken directly to the site. CNET reviewers apparently feel the need to have two boxes (for comfort?), but I come down again on the side of simplicity. One box equals less clutter.

A lot of Mac users are going to be frustrated that Chrome won’t run on their systems yet (or on Linux for that matter). Google supposedly has plenty of plans for the second release. And the program still has a few problems. For one, and I find this a bit annoying, Chrome sits on top of the taskbar at the bottom of my screen. I set the taskbar to auto-hide, and with every other browser the taskbar pops up again when I move my cursor to the bottom of the screen, but not so with Chrome. You have to minimize Chrome to get the taskbar back. Clearly that’s not the case if I have the taskbar always on, but it’s a nuisance nonetheless. I’m sure they’ll have it fixed in future versions.

If you want the whole scoop on Chrome, you can read about it to your heart’s content on CNET. I’m definitely infatuated with my new toy, but I still need a few more days running Firefox and Chrome together before I make any commitments. One thing’s for sure—I’m not going back to Internet Explorer anytime soon.