Basics Of Google Chrome 5

Chrome is a browser that doesn’t have a lot of market share at the moment (it’s nowhere near IE’s or even Firefox’s share), but is slowly and steadily gaining more usage as more people find out about it.

The current version of Chrome is 5. How to use Chrome is fairly easy. Watch the video below to learn some basics. Below are some additional notes I have about the browser.

Chrome Pros

The best browser to use if you use tons and tons of tabs.

Chrome is good if you’re the type that typically has many tabs open at once. When I say many, I mean 15 or more. Each tab in Chrome under the Windows OS is a separate instance of chrome.exe. I was successfully able to load up 50+ tabs all with content without a problem. It should be noted however that closing tabs is a different story. I’ll get to that in a moment.

The best browser to use on low-end computers.

If you have an older computer, Chrome is much better for daily use compared to IE or Firefox. It runs almost as speedy as Opera 10 does and can handle anything you can throw at it. While it may not use less memory, the way Chrome threads things is more streamlined. What this means is that there is far less stuttering/pausing when you load in a bunch of tabs or "heavy" web sites. On netbooks in particular is where you’ll see Chrome really shine.

HTML5 is the future

Chrome has support for HTML5, and this is where the web is going. You can get the jumpstart on using HTML5 now by using Chrome. When using the browser, see HTML5 in action by going to www.youtube.com/html5.

Chrome Cons

No native support for RSS

RSS feeds may be something that less people use these days, but there’s still a ton of people that do. Both IE and Firefox have had native RSS support for a long time, but Chrome never has. In order to get it, you must install an RSS Chrome extension just to be able to get the browser to "understand" how to handle an RSS feed.

No way to turn off auto-add of searches

This is a rather annoying problem with Chrome. If you go to almost any web site with a search function (like Wikipedia) and perform a search, Chrome will auto-add this into your search engine list. Go to Options / Basics / Manage button to see this. Not only does Chrome do this without telling you, but there is also no way to turn it off. What happens is that over time, your search engine list gets large and turns into a mess.

Opening of tabs fast, closing of tabs slow

Since each tab is a separate instance of chrome.exe in Windows, Chrome is a bit slow on the draw when it comes to closing them because it has to release the executable. This happens when you have many tabs open all with a site loaded in each tab. For example, if you have 20 tabs open, each with a site loaded, then press and hold CTRL+W, you’ll notice Chrome has to "think" a little before actually closing each tab. Firefox and Opera do not do this and close tabs much, much faster. Yes, this is a minor complaint, but it is something that will annoy some people.

Verdict (for now)

Chrome has had some significant improvements, but I still consider it a companion browser rather than a primary. The best power user’s browser is still Firefox because of its massive list of add-ons – however – when Firefox slows down after munching up too much memory (something that happens all too often), Chrome is there when you need it.

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