First thoughts on Google Chrome

 Any normal google announcement is normally preceeded by all the tech pundits giving it a bit of this and a bit of that.. this was no exception. 

 This time though, it was only because Google sent out a comic to some leading bloggers yesterday that anybody had any idea it was happening. One of the comments was, "Who Cares? After all Internet Explorer is still used by 70% of all internet users" .. true. Another 20% use Firefox, and the remaining 10% use a mix of Opera, Safari, Netscape and others. 

Day to day I generally use Firefox,  but regularly find my memory being abused to the point that my computer crawls to a halt. Even closing tabs still fails to reduce it enough. So lets run a very quick test.

Currently in Firefox I have 11 tabs open. Its using 213Mb of memory. With Google Chrome I have 10 tabs open, and in Task Manager I see 10 instances of Chrome running - 50mb + 19mb + 5mb + 44mb + 11mb + 23mb + 11mb + 16mb + 27mb + 10mb = 243mb of memory. 

You might think here I have a problem. Less tabs, using more memory. Not the case. I close one of those tabs, and I immediately get that memory back. In Firefox, it stays. In fact if I close all the tabs less one, its still using 158Mb of my precious RAM. As Google says:

Each browser tab operates as a separate process; by isolating tabs, should one tab crash or misbehave, others remain stable and responsive, and users can continue working without having to restart Google Chrome.

Its a lighning fast browser, with a noticeable difference to the speed of opening new pages.

First impressions?? GREAT! Considering I use a lot of different google online applications, it will be one of my most useful broswers... 

Anyway, one complaint.. I can scroll down using my trackpad, but can't scroll back up. Its not that bad, just use my up/down arrows.