Google Chrome for Linux (quick review)

Last Friday, 5th June, I saw on slashdot the following post: Google Announces Chrome For Mac and Linux Dev Builds. The announcement said something that immediately caught my attention and made me wanna try it:

DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are

a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete,

unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

So, I downloaded the ubuntu package from their dev channel and after a while trying it I found it very satisfactory.

From the things that doesn’t work yet the one I miss the most is the flash plugin. If your language is other than English you’ll find that input methods doesn’t work neither (no accents for now). Besides the missing features I haven’t had a single crash (yet) or any rendering issue. Web pages with javascript seems to go fast but not surprisingly fast, maybe I was expecting too much.

I guess there might be many blogs out there with good reviews of the Windows version, so I’ll just show a few snapshots I took.

New tab

The above picture shows how a new tab looks. As you can see it shows the most visited pages and the recently bookmarked and recently closed ones. It is still not possible to manage bookmarks or to add a bookmark bar.

Incognito mode

Por…, I mean, Incognito mode already works

Find in page

Something that bothered me at first is that the find in page bar is located at the right upper corner.

Omnibox

Omnibox is working although it is not possible yet to configure the search engines.

Download manager

I like the clean look of the download manager.

A lot of configuration options are still missing but my conclusion is that it’s nearly usable for every day use. I just wonder why it took so much time for Google to develop the Mac and Linux versions. Was it just because of technical difficulties? Was it a lack of interest? Or a mix of both?

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