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Potential makes up for Chrome's lack of polish
Google's new Chrome web browser, designed to crack Microsoft's dominance in internet-surfing software, is a nimble program whose potential makes up for its lack of polish, reviewers said.
- Bloomberg
- Published: 23:12 September 5, 2008
Taipei: Google's new Chrome web browser, designed to crack Microsoft's dominance in internet-surfing software, is a nimble program whose potential makes up for its lack of polish, reviewers said.
Available since Friday, Chrome is a "smart, innovative" browser that's "rough around the edges," the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg wrote. David Pogue at the New York Times called Chrome "a first-rate beginning."
"It's best to think of Chrome as exactly what it purports to be: a promising, modern, streamlined, nonbloated, very secure alternative to today's browsers," Pogue said. "Chrome is minimalist in the extreme."
Google, owner of the most popular search engine, plans to use Chrome to chip away at Microsoft's decade-long reign in web browsers, where its Internet Explorer has 70 per cent of the market.
Chrome's share may reach 20 per cent in two years, according to estimates by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. analyst Doug Anmuth in New York.
Google fell 84 cents to $464.41 at 4pm New York time yesterday in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares have dropped 33 per cent this year.
Chrome shows screen grabs of a user's most-visited websites on its opening page. The software isolates flawed web pages so users can close them without shutting down the entire browser, and will make it easier to run other applications without downloading them to a computer, according to Google.
Chrome "does take getting used to and could use a dab of polish here and there," USA Today's Edward C. Baig said.
The browser also competes with Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari. Microsoft, whose program comes pre-installed on personal computers from the world's biggest manufacturers, has dominated the market since overtaking Netscape Communications Inc.'s Navigator in 1999.
Standard web pages opened faster in Chrome than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, while being slower than Firefox and Apple's Safari, Mossberg wrote. More advanced pages using the JavaScript language were faster in Chrome than all the others, he wrote.
"With the emergence of Chrome, consumers have a new and innovative browser choice," Mossberg said. Coupled with Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer, "the new browser war is sure to be a worthy contest."
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