I was planning to make this post on the release date, but after playing around with Chrome for a bit I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to get away with a “Wow this is awesome, everything is great!” sort of post.

One thing about Google that has always gotten to me is that they release everything as a Beta. I can’t remember the last thing, if anything, they released that wasn’t branded a Beta. Gmail is still considered to be in Beta. Why not remove Beta and call it version X, or simply call it Gmail? Slapping Beta on everything seems like a way of escaping blame should problems occur, saying, “We told you it was Beta after all!” You could also look at it as them being eager to share their excitement about their cool new projects that aren’t quite finished yet.

I don’t want to come across as a Google-hater (do those even exist?); I love what they do. I use many of their products on a daily basis.

But this is about Chrome, so on to the meat:

Like many people, I downloaded Google’s new browser, Chrome, as soon as it went live. This had previously been no more than a rumor to me. A rumor that had been going around for so long that I completely given up on the idea that it might actually be true. That is, until a link to brand new info showed up on my Twitter client. Needless to say, I was ready to be blown away by something revolutionary. I was expecting to be impressed by a project Google had been working on for over two years, according to a recent Wired.com article.

After the rather quick install, I started surfing to my usual sites. After having visited a few sites without noticing anything monumental in terms of speed, I decided to run a bandwidth test to check my connection speed, which should normally be around 9-11mbps. The site I use, speedtest.net wouldn’t even load on the first few attempts. Flash crashed over and over again. Not a good start for the browser messiah. When it finally loaded the testing app, it was slow and clunky and my download speed didn’t even break 3mbps. My ping and upload speeds didn’t seem to be affected. I’ve used the site for a while now and never had issues, regardless of the browser being used. I tried again in Firefox and got more or less the same results. I did multiple tests on other sites with a plethora of applications in both Chrome and Firefox all telling me approximately the same thing. My previously blazing internet speed was nonexistent.

This was not turning out to be the fun experience I was hoping for. I decided to reboot my network and hopefully fix the issue. I first closed all my browser windows. After my network rebooted, I launched Firefox first and ran the test. The result was 10.8 mbps. I opened Chrome and ran the test on there. Flash was still a bit slow and my speed result after the test was nearly cut in half. I have since attempted to play some games on Kongregate, and flash still chokes quite often.

How Chrome may be causing this, or if it is doing anything at all, is beyond my knowledge at this point. I have only seen a few posts from other people having similar issues. One person mentioned that it seemed odd that a company that owns YouTube would make a browser that didn’t run Flash flawlessly. I have to agree with that point. I am still using Chrome, but I worry about it crashing every time I go to a site where Flash is important or in some cases essential. It is blazing fast on most of my normal sites (Digg, Twitter, and pretty much every Google site, including YouTube). No worries about flash there. But on other sites, the speed is simply average or even slow by some standards.

For the past day, I have been running both Chrome and Firefox side by side on separate monitors. I know I’ve been going on about my bad initial experience with it, but I can now say that I do like Chrome, even with its rather short list of features. I like that I don’t lose my other 8 or 9 tabs if one dies in Chrome. I like the way a tab can be dragged from the browser to create its own window instead of an HTML document on my desktop. Another positive is that the tabs from separate instances of Chrome can be moved seamlessly back and forth. While this option is available in Firefox, it’s just not as pretty or as smooth a transition. The Task Manager is also nice touch and so are the “Stats for Nerds”. And I love that it’s an open source project. The negatives are the very few options for configuring the browser and the lack of plug-ins available right now. Yes, I know it was released just 2 days ago. And yes, I know it’s only a Beta, Version 0.2.194.27 in fact, at the time I’m writing this. I guess I was just expecting more. I like the look and feel of Chrome, but I can’t see myself giving up the ever-expanding functionality that plug-ins bring to Firefox, or the more advanced developer tools and long list of options available to make Firefox run exactly how I want it to. Not in the near future, anyway.

As a whole, I would say that Chrome, while not the best browser out there, appears to have a great foundation to build upon. I can’t wait to see how other browsers incorporate what Google has done, and how the open source community pushes it to the next level.

Maybe calling everything a Beta isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Maybe the people at Google view their work with the philosophy of an artist, whereby a work is never finished, only abandoned. So, calling everything a Beta allows them to continuously perfect their “art”. That is a philosophy I can relate to and respect.