Google Chrome, I am Not Impressed

Ok, I give Google props for making an effort to advance browser technology. They are pushing in the right direction I believe with promises of better process/memory management, smarter history/search/bookmarks, more efficient JavaScript execution using a virtual machine and most importantly offline application capability. In essence, creating an application platform to be used online or offline.

Admittedly, it is a beta browser and therefore we should automatically excuse any poor performance, right? Sure, beta means forgive us of our mistakes and btw, you get extra geek points for using beta software. Anyway, I have only given the browser a few minutes of my time but as of right now I am unimpressed. It locked up while I was using Google Docs, no less. It created the isolated separate processes for each tab (I had three open) as Google promised it would. Each process was using around 20MBs each. However, the fourth process, which was the parent, effectively locked up using 100% CPU while I was trying to save a document and therefore the whole browser was locked and rendered useless.

Obviously, the release of the Google Chrome browser has received much hype and therefore I am confident Google will continue to work out the kinks. It will be interesting to see where this takes the browser market and how quickly the other browsers incorporate Gears and a JavaScript virtual machine.