One of the first things I noticed about Chrome after moving from Firefox is the lack of the quick search box. At first I thought I would miss this alot because I use the quick search box in Firefox all the time. However Chrome’s address bar is more intuitive and powerful than Firefox’s and does the job of address and quick search box perfectly well.
In Firefox when you start typing you get a list of suggestions from your history and bookmarks. But you have to physically select an item from the list using the arrow keys and enter, or the mouse.
I have been using Firefox forever, but I just decided to give Google Chrome a real shot to see how I like it. And my first impression of it is the awesome speed. All the PR about the speed of Chrome seems to be true in my limited subjective experience with it. Just browsing all my normal websites I see a noticeable display time improvement. JavaScript heavy pages (i.e. Gmail) in particular load very quickly. Even graphic heavy pages seem to load more snappily.
The release of Chrome is just great for all of us. Now that web standards are starting to become well… standard, for all browsers except for IE, the more browsers the better. With Chrome, Opera, and Safari all focusing heavily on performance Firefox is already starting to follow suite.
Chrome is good so far, and I hope it keeps moving along.
