Google Chrome : For the impatient ones

Yes, I consider myself among them. I mean, I’m the kind of guy who gets annoyed when Windows takes more than 30-40 seconds to boot up. In all other aspects of life, I’m very patient, but when it comes to stuff like this, I must have stuff done quick.

Enter Google Chrome

Well, once I headed over to the download site, I was handed the thing I hate the most, from the core of my heart. A web downloader. Now I’m the kind of guy who prefers his setups to be standalones. I should be able to use a USB drive to transfer the setups to a friend’s PC without an internet connection (yeah, I know what you’re thinking…a web browser for a PC without internet…intriguing…if so, leave that chain of thought, cuz this is purely hypothetical). Anyway, I should be able to install the software without any problems. In fact, most of Google’s software uses Google Updater, which is a downright pain in the arse.

Anyway, back to the browser. It takes a very short time to download, and sets itself up with no hassles. This is another thing I don’t like about Google software. At no point does it ask you where to install itself. It isn’t a problem for me because I’ve set my Program File folder to E: drive, but there are other poor souls out there who would appreciate this tiny gesture.

The browser is refreshingly open and simple. This is one browser which realises that a user doesn’t want to see toolbars and loading bars, or borders or anything of that sort. It’s very very minimalistic. Yet, I felt completely at home, immediately. I instinctively knew where all the buttons would be.

The homepage when you start a new tab is pretty useful. It’s like Opera’s Speed Dial, with the exception that there aren’t any keyboard shortcuts to launch these sites. Chrome takes some time to understand your browsing patterns and accordingly displays the sites in the 3×3 grid.

Importing settings was a very simple job, and in a jiffy, my bookmarks and history from Firefox was transferred to Chrome. I couldn’t import all my saved passwords though. And this is a small problem with Chrome – it doesn’t encrypt my passwords like Firefox used to. Firefox had a Master Password with which I could unlock my passwords. Chrome doesn’t have anything of that sort, which means that unless my user in Windows has a password, anyone can access my mail.

The Options page is pretty sparse, with very few settings you can tweak. There’s nothing like Firefox’s about:config, which I can use to tweak with the more inner settings. However, it is all excessively simple.

Google Chrome has an internal Task Manager which I think is a very good addition. This allows a user to kill off a pesky tab, without bringing the entire browser crashing down. This is actually because of the fact that for every tab you open, Chrome creates a new thread, which can be individually closed.

Incognito Mode of course is a very widely publicised feature of Google Chrome, for reasons both you and I know very well. It basically makes your actions untraceable on your PC. However keep in mind that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) or the server you contact may be logging your activity, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Incognito ensures that no history is maintained for that period and that cookies are deleted after the Incognito session is over, apart from other things.

Chrome lacks in the ability to create multiple profiles, like I did in Firefox. I used to keep one for General use, and one for my Quizzing, where I had ~1500 Wikipedia articles open, and all of them loading from the offline cache.

But I seem to be forgetting one very major detail. Actually, it has a lot to do with the title of the post – For the impatient ones. Compared to all the other browsers I’ve used, Google Chrome stands out for one very important reason. Assuming that you’re PC is idling, and you double-click on the Chrome icon, you’re very likely to see the homepage within a second or two, which is quite an achievement in my opinion.

Internet Explorer gets close, but I don’t trust that browser. Even though it recently beat all the others in a malicious software test, I still can’t come myself to believe that it offers impenetrable security. Firefox is the only other major contender, and it takes ages to load into my PCs memory. And in case any other CPU intensive task is taking place, I can literally go make myself a cup of coffee before Firefox comes to life. And yes, I’ve tried the Safe Mode with no add-ons, but it doesn’t really help all that much. I will still be using Firefox for certain tasks, like, for example, quizzing, but I have to admit that I’m addicted to the speeds that Chrome offers when starting up. And it’s not as if it’s a slouch when rendering pages. I can’t give you exact figures, but I’ve never for a moment felt that it was slow.

In conclusion, it’s a pretty good browser. It’s officially my primary browser now, till it crashes bigtime or something along the lines of that…