With the release of Google’s Chrome, the search engine giant has taken yet another step towards total internet domination. Chrome came with plenty of hype, it’s very own comic-book and a Twitterstream of rapt anticipation, well, from the tech-geeks anyways.

First Impressions

Personally, I was curious to see the browser and it’s sleek, minimalist design (not to mention read the comic written/illustrated by Scott McLeod). So the question is whether or not Chrome is as good out of the box as FireFox (I haven’t used IE in so long that I’m not even including it in the comparison).

The setup/installation was really fast, and I do mean fast. It took me less than 5 minutes to download, install, import and start browsing. Right off the bat I enjoy the minimalist design of the browser (although it seems strange to not have my toolbar full of useful buttons at the top of the screen) and the lightning fast page loads, but the interface lacks personality. Don’t get me wrong, I love white-space as much as anyone, but Chrome has no character, it’s almost too plain. The internal task manager is another cool feature, and I am sure that “going incognito” will make Chrome a favorite of teenage boys who don’t have their own computers.

What I find strange is that Google hasn’t even made the Google toolbar compatible with Chrome yet? I understand that this is a beta, so I’m not expecting there to be 1,000s of add-ons (a la Firefox), but I would at least expect the browser to integrate Google applications like GTalk, Gmail, GCal, etc…in an attempt to unify the Google experience. Maybe that’s coming in Chrome beta 2.

Better Than The Competition?

While at this point it may seem extraordinarily unfair to compare Chrome to Firefox (whose biggest benefit is the sheer number of add-ons available to customize your browsing experience), I have to do it, because Firefox is the gold standard for browser’s in my opinion, and my opinion is what this column is all about. So here we go.

I can’t really speak to back-end issues, I’m not a developer. Sure I read the Chrome comic, and I understood it, but since Firefox doesn’t have a comic to explain its processes to me, I’m afraid that I have no basis for a comparison. I swear, every product release should be in comic form, I would have read so many more of them if they were (especially if Scott McLeod was writing them). So, instead I’m going to focus mainly on the UI and the experience of using Chrome as opposed to Firefox.

Firefox vs. Chrome

Chrome has some significant improvements over Firefox (speed, stability and security right off the bat), but that doesn’t mean it’s some sort of cure-all for that which ails you. Sure, Firefox can get bogged down like IE (my dad has a nasty habit of running way too many tabs)and it certainly can be crashed. Chrome’s ability to maintain individual tabs independently of each other is a huge step forward in terms of usability and stability. The security features the Chrome team built in to the browser definitely provided a level of safety that is a notch above anything we had before it’s release. All of these things imply that Chrome is your best bet for internet browsing.

Here’s the rub, although Chrome is open-source and built on an open source platform, it was developed by Google. Firefox has the backing of much of the tech-industry, not to mention a loyal user base. I’m sure that many of those users (myself included) will give Chrome a try, but will it ever be as feature rich as Firefox? Will all those API developers stop working on their FF plugins and switch to Chrome? In the short run, I seriously doubt it, but it could happen.

For now, I’ll stick with Firefox (although I have been eying Flock as of late, and with a few minor improvements could be easily persuaded to switch to the socialized version of Firefox). Chrome is certainly promising, but it will be hard for me to break most of the Firefox habits I’ve acquired, much less to live without all of the plugins that I use on a daily basis. The first release of chrome is certainly impressive and I hope that it improves, because it has a huge upside, but until Google can raise it’s flag on top of Mount Mozilla, I can’t see myself converting.

How do you think Chrome stacks up to Firefox? IE7 (or 8)? Safari? Opera? I’m definitely interested to hear your thoughts.

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