Now that I have had a couple of weeks to try out Chrome, Google’s new Web Browser, I can finally give it a review.
Based on the kind of work I do, the browser is my most useful tool. No other software comes close in terms of hours spent in heavy usage than my trusty web browser. But I also heavily rely on Google Apps, especially Gmail , Google Analytics, Google Calendar, and, well just about all of it. So, I expected that Chrome would be better suited to handle Gmail than Firefox, since both are Google Products. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Forget that fact that there are no handy plugins like BetterGmail2 that I can use with Chrome, let’s just focus on usability: Firefox is more usable, in just about every way. With FF, I can paste pretty much everything into a composed email and it will line up properly. With Chrome, it lacks the intuitive style of FF to know what I want to do… Simple pasting of content copied off the web becomes a chore, rather than a convenience.
Scrolling with my mouse-wheel is another weakness in Chrome, or strength in FF. FF intuitively knows what I want to have happen when I move that thing up and down. With Chrome, I have to add a couple of extra clicks to get the mouse wheel to function the way it should function.
In all fairness, Chrome is in it’ first beta release, and all of these perks have not made it’s way in yet, plausibly, and so I’ll give it another try in version 1.0. For now, thank God for Firefox!