Google Chrome First Impression

Yesterday, Google released their own browser. This release was like a little surprise. While it has been rumoured to be in work for a while, it was announced only the day before.

I don't know how many people downloaded it yesterday, but I'm one of them. I saw the little comic book  explaining how the browser work and wanted to put my hand on the product. After a few hour playing with it, here are y tought on the browser :

• It's fast! Right when you start it, it really scream... It feels faster that Firefox 3. When you click, it looks like your actions are instantanious. For some reason, I'm even able to watch some higher definition movien in Flash that I were constantly pausing when using Firefox 3 (I don't beleive the browser makes Flash run better, but thats the feeling I get). Switching between tabs is also instantanious.
• Damn my screen look larger. The minimalist user interface make your browsing surface a bit larger. Granted, you could do that with IE and Firefox in Kiosk mode. But here, you have no choice... Just a big browsing area.
• Where are my mouse gestures? I was using a mouse gesture extension in Firefox. There seem to be no extensions and no way to write them for Chrome (I'm probably wrong here... I guess the APIs are not realsed yet but they'll be coming in a futher release).
• Better Privacy. Not so fast. They claim better privacy... But their password manager is not encrypted nor password protected! I don't realsy care about the other privacy features they offer. I don't believe they are much better that the ones in Firefox. I don't feel that the Internet is a dangerous place anyway.
• Gears bundled in. The Gears API are natively supported in the browser. They even automatically grant www.google.com the necessary rights. They shouldn't do that. However, they don't grant docs.google.com the Gears rights.
• I already miss extensions.

Overall, I feel this is a solid beta realease. I will keep using Chrome as my default browser for at least a few days. Maybe I'll get back to Firefox to get my extensions back.