SMF

And it's online now!

I've been using it for about an hour.

Not as many options as FF (not counting addons/plugins) but is much faster than IE8. I'm so used to FF that I'll probably stick with it in the long run. But it's definitely got possibilities.

Only for Vista and XP now. Apparently, Linux and Apple versions coming.

It is beta.

Hoos wrote:I've been using it for about an hour.

Not as many options as FF (not counting addons/plugins) but is much faster than IE8. I'm so used to FF that I'll probably stick with it in the long run. But it's definitely got possibilities.

ditto

Do you trust putting a beta software on your computer?

tonyespo wrote:Do you trust putting a beta software on your computer?

More than I'd trust putting a final release of IE on my computer.

Tony, good question. This particular install is very benign, and quite tiny, does not overwrite anything nor does it require a reboot; however if you want to use the IE 8 beta and have access to a virtual PC, it would be better to make use of it and not install it as your primary browser (though it can be easily uninstalled AND you can also create a restore checkpoint and do a system restore in a pinch).
The Google browser itself in its current form is not that impressive, the real trick is the way it works with applications.

After about 4 hours of use, I gave up on Chrome.

It became very slow to render or to surf and slowed down other programs on my computer (which went away after closing it).

It has some quirks that were annoying, but nothing horrendous.

As to Tony's question, no I wouldn't trust beta software. For secure things like banking or anything private that I might be concerned about (as in where I keep my stash of MWF and Swedish Gillettes).

To try it out with some benign surfing? Sure. At least from a company that I have some trust in. If it were some company I'd never heard of, or if it was something that just showed up in email - a BIG NO to that.

However, while I use Gmail a lot, it is still in beta. I don't trust it for important email (family, banking, etc.), but do for everything else. I have a separate, private email account for the truly critical stuff.

Total time it was on my computer: 5 minutes.
When the son of a gun wanted to keep connecting out to Google updates when I told it not to, it came off with no hesitation.
Looks not bad though, yet it is very sparse and my Admuncher doesn't work on it to kill those awful ads.

The "updates" that Chrome wants from the Google servers are two lists of bad sites (i.e., malware distribution pints and known phishing sites). As for the IE8 beta, it uses almost 400MB of RAM at start time and more processes than Windows XP itself. Bzzzzt! Back to Firefox for me, too...that is, when I can't reach a Mac or a Sun. :7)

- will

Time will tell how Chrome pans out, at least post-beta, that is. But one thing I must comment on is that if done right, it has the potential to blow IE and even FireFox out of the water. Main reason being that it has been designed bottom up, fresh, to deal with today's content intensive web sites. IE and FireFox are both big time refinements of old, really old technology, and cannot be fundamentally redesigned. They can't even handle a crash inside a tab - if a page crashes, and you have 5 more tabs open, they all go.

Chrome, on the other hand, is supposed to handle such scenarios. It was designed with multi-tasking and content heavy applications in mind. On top of that, it seems blazing fast. The fact that they have one of the most elite and admired teams of software engineers, with an almost unlimited budget, is not to be dismissed.

I'm keeping FireFox for now, but keeping an eye out for the more refined versions of Google's entry.

My browser attention span is less than five minutes. Growing up on netscape, they all seem to be not that good in comparison, but netscape is no longer so tough titties for me. In any event, howcome Opera isn't spoken about that often. I downloaded version 9 the other day and for the few minutes I plaued with it the experience was quite good. The email client it comes with seemed half decent too.

Thanks for any comments you gents might have about Opera

Clive

Clive, I don't use Opera in PCs, but I will tell you that Opera is considered the best for mobile devices. It's what I use in my Blackberry, and to be honest, I don't know anyone personally that has not replaced their Blackberry browser with Opera. As for PCs, I do believe they are number 3 or 4, behind IE and FireFox. Not too shabby, really.

Crhis, I would not worry too much. Google has earned its reputation in part for being the most progressive in affording privacy and user rights. I'd worry more about Microsoft products, and to be honest, would not even worry too much about that. I have yet to read any EULA that sounds harmless/friendly.

Thanks for the comments John

Clive

When it gets most of the extensions I use for Firefox, Chrome will probably be my browser of choice.

Chrome is built on an outdated version of Safari, it's no ground-up new project, and IE 8 will offer all the tab isolation and crash recover features of Chrome, and a lot more, including privacy features like InPrivate browsing, InPrivate blocking, enhanced delete browsing history, a SmartScreen filter, cross site scripting filter, etc . Take it for a spin, it's very stable. Or don't, FireFox is a great product. Here is a fair and even handed writeup of IE8 Beta 2

Been running Chrome for about 30 minutes on my XP machine. It does seem faster than Firefox.

So far, so good.

Greg

Zach wrote:Chrome is built on an outdated version of Safari, it's no ground-up new project, and IE 8 will offer all the tab isolation and crash recover features of Chrome, and a lot more, including privacy features like InPrivate browsing, InPrivate blocking, enhanced delete browsing history, a SmartScreen filter, cross site scripting filter, etc . Take it for a spin, it's very stable. Or don't, FireFox is a great product. Here is a fair and even handed writeup of IE8 Beta 2

And isn't Safari built on KDE's browser, Konqueror?

Yes, in early 2003 or so, when it was released, it was based on the KHTML engine from the KDE team.