Hands on: Google Chrome review

Updated: read our full review of Google Chrome.

I've been using the Google Chrome web browser for half an hour now, and I already feel right at home. Downloading and installing Google Chrome was quick and painless - a welcome contrast to the chaos and downloading hassles accompanying the launch of Mozilla's Firefox 3.0 browser in July.

Within just a couple of minutes, Google Chrome had hoovered up hundreds of Firefox bookmarks, saved passwords and my recent browsing history. This gives a pretty seamless transition to Google Chrome - with the exception of my RSS feeds, which weren't imported automatically and aren't supported in this 0.2 Beta version of Chrome.

First impressions

Google Chrome is so unobtrusive it almost isn't even there - a clear design choice by Google, which has just a tiny, semi-transparent logo above the tabs, running along the top of the screen. There's no status bar, although another semi-transparent tab appears at the bottom of the screen showing the status of loading pages.

Each tab has its own small forward, backward, reload and new tab buttons, along with a couple of menu items and the address bar - or Omnibar if you speak Google. The tabs can be 'ripped' to the desktop to form new windows just by drag-and-dropping - another neat touch.

The Omnibar is much more than just a place for typing URLs. Most importantly, it doubles as a search box: type search terms and hit Enter to be taken to your local Google website. It autocompletes with a level of smarts that rivals (if not exceeds) Firefox's new Awesome bar, picking out previously visited sites intelligently and extremely quickly.

Speed freak

You want quick? You got it. Google Chrome feels nippier than Firefox all round, as well it should considering the demands it places on your computer. With each Google Chrome tab forming a separate process, you quickly build up a list of 'chrome.exe's in your Windows Task Manager (Linux and Mac versions coming soon, apparently). This means that one bad tab can't crash your whole surfing session but I think I'll have to keep a sharp eye on how many tabs I have open, especially when working on less powerful machines.

Google Chrome munches through media sites with ease, streaming music and video and handling Flash very smoothly. PDFs open so suddenly that you might not even realise you're using them. Opening a new tab brings up not your home page (although you can switch to that) but a thumbnail view of your nine most visited sites, plus recent bookmarks and a box to search your history. It loads almost instantly but is visually cluttered and doesn't really do anything that the Omnibox and a good selection of bookmarks can't handle.

And now the bad news

Of course, Google Chrome's not perfect. It's not working very well with the touchpad on my HP laptop and I've had a couple of page errors - annoyingly just now while working on the Tech Radar website (this post is being composed in safe old Firefox). There are no plug ins for Chrome just yet, either, so it does feel like a very stripped-down, Google-heavy environment right now, especially as I'm used to having widgets all over the place.

But these are typical issues for a new version of any browser, let alone one that has been built from scratch. Overall, my first impression of Chrome is 9/10 for speed, 8/10 for ease of use and 7/10 for stability. And those figures should have Microsoft and Mozilla very, very worried.

UPDATE: Latest screenshots added