(1) Speed – Chrome is crazy fast. My technical friends have been telling me about the lightning-fast load times of Chrome as compared to Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE. Check it out yourself. Plenty of speed-tests are documented, just search something like “which browser is the fastest”.
(2) Search – I appreciate simple design. Chrome combines URL and Search into one omnibar. It’s clean and intuitive…if I know the URL, I type it. If I don’t, Chrome treats my typed gibberish like a search phrase and returns results in a snap.
(3) Space – One of the benefits of Chrome is a very compact menu and button area at the top of the window. This design saves content area real estate. So, I see more of the page that I want to view and less of the browser menus (the overhead). I like that a lot.
(4) Security – “Chrome is a huge leap forward with its ground-up rewrite.” Dino Dai Zovi is co-author of The Mac Hacker’s Handbook. Dai Zovi contends that Chrome is the security standard in browsers because of the ability to “sandbox” – to separate user data, applications, and the operating system.
Finally, let’s deal with the elephant in the post: Google owns Chrome. Some view Google as the Wal-Mart of the internet – too big, too much influence, and an evil empire determined to rule the world. Although entertaining, that topic is way beyond the scope of this post! I’ll let Oliver Stone take a swing at that piñata.
I’m just saying that as a “user”, I like Chrome for 4 reasons: speed, search, space, and security. Give it a test drive, and tell me what you think!