I, for one, am completely unimpressed with the current state of Chrome.

First and foremost, to download and install the damned thing, you have to download Google Installer. This should have been a sign to cancel the download and walk away to begin with, but I figured I'd give it a chance and allow it to launch and do its thing.

Now, as this progress bar for the program continued rightward, I figured this was the say-all end-all installation progress for Chrome. I was wrong. In addition to the download taking about ten minutes on its own (how big -is- the bastard anyways), it took at least equally as long for the thing to install on my machine. Of course, this was accompanied by the ever-annoying infinite progress animation, so you have no idea when or if the damn thing will finish.

Now after I had forgotten about it and was reminded by its "Installation finished" dialog interrupting my playing a flash game on Kongregate, I decided to give it a try and closed Firefox. This was also about the time I noticed Google Updater had launched itself. Goody.

Now I don't mind Chrome's interface at all, I love simple. After all, it's why I ditched MSN/AIM/Yahoo/ICQ for Trillian, then ditched that for Miranda. The tabs were above the address bar but I got used to it, and resumed my routine internet activities.

I don't know about anyone else, but the first thing I do is modify the program settings how I want them. This is a short endeavour, considering there's three option group tabs, which basically boils down to what to do on startup, where to save downloaded files, toggling the usage statistics option (and it doesn't even say they're anonymous statistics, hmmm), and turn off its' retarded "phishing and malware protection". If you ask me, only paranoid and non-tech-savvy users would use this thing, but that's for another day.

The first page I could think of was the developer forums, so I went there first. Before I get to anything else, I have to point out how annoying the "omnibar" is. Apparently, this bastard is prefetching as I'm typing and can offer the page's full address and title before I can even finish. This may be a great feature for people with short term memory loss, but I don't want this damned thing suggesting pages, searches, or suggestions on suggestions while I'm trying to go to byond.com without it holding my hand. Apparently, this is a concept borrowed from Firefox 3, and nobody liked it there either. Go figure.

Now, by this time, I had been hearing everyone raving about Chrome's inherent ability to do everything twice as good as Firefox, including "blazing page loads". As I write this post, I have yet to see any page load that is faster than my Firefox 2.0.0.16, and the first page I visited was no exception. If anything, it was probably slower (and before anyone starts bitching, I cleared out Firefox's cache and CTRL+f5'd the same page I had open in Chrome to make these comparisons).

Now being a Firefox user of a few years, I got used to scroll-wheel clicking to open links in new tabs, so at this point I was bombing through the forums and opening as many tabs as I could, mimicking my typical browsing behaviour. Still no "blazing" loads.

Around this time, buttersafe and notalwaysright links were being posted in Chatters. I decided to open these in Chrome as well, and had about fourteen tabs open at once. No significant impact on my computing or browsing yet, so thus far its' capability to sustain its tabs was comparable to my Firefox 2 installation. Then the YouTube links were being posted. Oh god.

Now, on my Firefox 2, the tab containing YouTube pages always hung for about five seconds after the initial page load. I have no clue why, it just does, then it's fine for the duration of its tabby existence. Chrome was subject to the same problem, but took at least five times as long to return to "smooth" browsing -- that is, the pages not jerking when I scrolled with the mouse's wheel, tab switches being recognized immediately, and other such things I expect it to be able to keep up with.

Now, not only do I regularly have 20+ tabs open at any given time, I'm swapping between them a helluva lot. Chrome managed to completely stop every tab on me while YouTube was loading its video. At least in Firefox's five-second "wtf" period I can still swap tabs with about a half-second's delay on recognition I did so. After the initial lockup, I hit play on the video and the tab ceased operating. Then about thirty seconds later while I was doing other stuff waiting for it, I get a prompt claiming flash player has crashed. What the-hell ever. I allowed Chrome to unload the plugin, which of course didn't affect only that tab, it unloaded flash player entirely from every tab. Great, now I had seven useless tabs.

Seven tab closings later, I was back to 15 between the BYOND forums, buttersafe, and notalwaysright. It was around this time I really started noticing the damn thing bogging. It kept pulling this crap on me where, upon switching a tab, the window remained blank for about ten seconds before finally dialup-downloading into existence -- that annoying top-down load by a single horizontal row of pixels at a time. Every tab started doing this around this time and still hasn't quit it.

Now a bout of unconsciousness in bed later, I decided to continue my trial run of Chrome. It was then I noticed the screenshot-based history upon launching it again, which isn't too bad I suppose, though I'd rather just turn the damn history off like I have it in Firefox. Again on the developer forums, I get to about ten tabs, having some Google searches open and some random result tabs as well. It was around this time I decided to try out Kongregate, and why I thought it would be any better than how YouTube fared on it was a mystery.

Now, because I'm getting sleepy, I'm just gonna cut the Kongregate story short: the games lagged like bastards, the chats crashed, flash player supposedly stopped working again, and the flash player plugin was unloaded from every tab yet again.

Now, Chrome has some of the right ideas, but this beta is nothing special and undeserving of all the praise people keep showering on it. If it comes out of alpha, or if I hear something about a major update of some variety, I may download it and try it out again. In the meantime, though, I'm going to continue to be pissed off at it. Firefox 2 is performing loads better than it on my system.