It was a small download in two parts: First the installer, which then downloads the actual application. Installation was smooth and fast. I was up and running in 5 mins.
The very first impression on looks - Wow!. very sleek, clean, and simple. Minimum space taken for the frame and other non-viewing areas. I really liked it. +1 for the looks.
Next I tried the address bar to see if it was as good as firefox's "awesome bar".
Nop, not that good. I tried training it for gmail, which I use a lot. In firefox, aftergoing to gmail about 2,3 times, it 'learns' the page, and next time when I start typing 'gmail', the first entry in the dropdown is the gmail url. But in chrome, it's always the third entry. The first entry is always 'search for gmail'. Takes more key presses for me to select the url. Not very smart. -1 for the address bar.
Next I tried facebook, to test the 'super fast' V8 javascript engine. Chrome claims it to be very advanced, very fast and very responsive.
So I went to facebook, and tried to view an image. Chrome just froze for about 4 seconds taking 99% CPU!!.
However Chrome was specially designed to handle this kind of scenarios where a page misbehaves, and has a built-in 'Task Manager' where we can see which page is misbahaving and kill it. So I tried it. Alas! It wasn't a specific page but 'chrome' itself that was misbehaving and taking 99% CPU; and it couldn't be killed from chromes task manager. Chrome simply failed at one of it's primary goals!. Anyway what was chrome doing taking 99 CPU? maybe it was doing some advanced calculus to figure out the most optimum path to be 'super responsive'!. -9 for overall performance.
(maybe this had something to do with me running it in a VM; but I don't see how)
Next, the 'Most Visited Pages' available on a new tab. Very much like Opera's speed dial. Not a feature I really liked, but it was ok. However it had this glitch where it would show me gmail twice; Not very smart.
I'll wait for the linux version of chrome, and try it out. I really hope google irons out the theses wrinckles before they do.
