Google Chrome First Impressions

In case you missed it, Google released their own web browser today, built on Webkit. It’s interesting, and their comic book presentation has some interesting selling points, so I installed it and took it for a spin.

First impressions? Not very usable for me yet. Why? I can tell you that…

• Starts off with a Firefox bookmark/password/history import. That’s nice, but it doesn’t bother to ask me which Firefox profile I want to import. Apparently it just chose the first one on the list — or maybe it was random, who knows. And while that worked well for the laptop I tried it on, that would be the wrong profile to import on my work computer.
• Speaking of which, there doesn’t seem to be any support for multiple profiles like in Firefox. I can’t function without multiple profiles. On my work machine I need a work-related profile, and a personal profile stored on a Truecrypt volume where all the traffic is tunneled over an SSH proxy. At home I have 2 or 3 often-used profiles and another two or three rarely used ones.
• Speaking of my SSH proxy, when I tried to set that up at work today, it brought up the IE options screen to setup what looks like a Windows-wide proxy setting. That’s not what I want; I want to set a proxy for Chrome to use — and preferably just one of many Chrome profiles — not for everything in Windows to use. How am I supposed to test out this supposedly enhanced performance for things like Gmail when I can’t properly give Chrome a proxy that would let me get to Gmail in the first place?
• Speaking of improved performance and better resiliency to one tab or plug-in causing problems, I’m not seeing it. In my limited use of Chrome (I’m back to Firefox now) I had more instances of the entire browser freezing for 5-15 seconds at a time than I’ve ever seen before. That was usually related to using YouTube (which, being a Google site, you would have expected better results from.) Whatever they’re doing to isolate the tabs in unique processes isn’t working well, since I couldn’t do anything anywhere in Chrome when that happened. I was willing to put up with some of Chrome’s limitations while I tried it out, but getting in the way of my web browsing like that was the last straw.
• Speaking of other limitations… no way to encrypt the saved passwords with a master password, the way Firefox can? Boo.
• No plugin collection or API published yet (that I could find…) Most people who use Firefox have a ton of plugins, from ad-blocking (I’m sure Google’s a big fan of that one) to the slick new Ubiquity to download managers to Greasemonkey to who-knows-what. I’m not ready to give up all those features to help test out Chrome.
• I’m not seeing the improved performance that they were promoting. In fact, in Google Analytics it felt like the browser was responding slower than Firefox does.
• The “Omnibar” seems basically the same as Firefox 3’s Awesomebar, doesn’t it? And the 9 commonly-used pages as your home page is an Opera feature, right?
• I like the idea that web pages can’t pop-up a window anywhere outside of their tab, but in practice that wasn’t the case with my testing. I’m assuming they’re doing a pop-up with Flash or something else besides Javascript, and therefore getting around Chrome’s restrictions. It’s funny that even Google’s stuff is able to pop-up new windows outside of the tab it came from, though.
• What the hell was McCain thinking with this Sarah Palin? This is all a big joke on America, right? Some elaborate, surreal prank? Oops, sorry, wrong topic. I just can’t get the craziness of that pick out of my head for long, apparently…
• Incognito tabs are an interesting idea, but that’s partially why I have multiple Firefox profiles; that way I can have a consistent and persistent alternate web identity with different cookies and its own history. If I really don’t want the browser saving anything I do, I’ll run Firefox in a sandbox using Sandboxie, which gives me much more fine-grained control over how its limited than Chrome does.

So, there you have some initial impressions. I like the idea in theory, but I don’t think Chrome is ready for me to use for much just yet.