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.)

(more…)