Portfolio and Blog of Dan Mowchan

Just recently, I switched (again) from Safari to Firefox because DeviantART was not loading correctly in Safari. First thing I did was install a theme to make it look as much like Safari as possible and moved my bookmarks over. Now that the Google Chrome for Mac beta has been released I have reluctantly installed it. Chrome is clean, fast and pretty. I’m impressed.

The first time I started Chrome I almost fell off of my seat. It was fast. I have never seen any browser start this quick. Within what must’ve been a split second, I was browsing in Chrome and visiting some of my favorite websites. Thanks to the WebKit base, Chrome had absolutely no problems with rendering. Every website I tried displayed exactly (or close) to how it would’ve in Firefox or Safari. The difference is that websites seemed to be drawn a bit quicker than the other browsers; which is a plus.

As a browser that is just starting to grow, Chrome doesn’t have so much community driven plugins and themes as Firefox does. The capability is coming, but even without these features Google has built an amazing web browser. There are a limited selection of themes but they are really just images that overlay the normal colors of the browser. Only a handful are really tolerable and the rest are just rubbish. Don’t get me wrong, however, the default theme integrates nicely with Mac OSX.

One feature that I truly miss from Firefox is Live Bookmarks. Thanks to Firefox’s built-in RSS reader, it has this capability. I can’t help but think that a similar feature will be coming to Chrome that will integrate in with the existing Google Reader service. If this ever does come to be true, it would be off in the future. For now, I just dropped my most visited websites in the bookmark bar for a quick visit.

As a person who really did not want to give Chrome a chance, I am thoroughly impressed with the efforts put forth by Google. I will be using this browser for a long time because of the sheer performance of it. In the future I hope to see a lot more features to make the browser even more competitive with Firefox. Give it a try and let me know what you think of it in the comments!