If you haven’t heard about this, then you must not be as big a geek as me. Google released their own web browser, called Chrome, today.
News of the new browser hit the internet yesterday when someone at Google supposedly accidentally leaked the announcement (in comic book form) a day early.
Normally I use Firefox, which is far superior to Internet Explorer, which I gave up on several years ago. (Except I have to use IE at work because they don’t let us install anything that isn’t officially blessed by the IT gods, who really don’t know crap about the internet because they’re all old Cobol programmers who started working there back in the days when IT was known as DP.)
So I downloaded Chrome tonight and took it for a spin. The download and install were both fast and painless. It allows you to automatically import your bookmarks, settings, and saved passwords from your default browser. I surfed a few pages that I go to frequently and they all seemed to load very fast. I didn’t see any problems with rendering css or html so I would assume it is standards-compliant (though I haven’t checked to be sure).
It has a very nice look and feel. Clean and uncluttered. And each tab has it’s own address bar and controls (back, forward, refresh). Chrome will also keep track of your most visited sites and when you open a new empty tab, give a list of them along with your bookmarks. You can also search from the address bar. I always hated searching from the address bar in IE and Firefox because the way they try to autocomplete your text is annoying. Google actually makes this work well in Chrome by dropping the suggested terms to a separate box below the text-entry box. There is also a feature for private browsing called an “incognito window” (Click the “Control the current page” button -> New Incognito Window). This lets you browse without saving any history or cookies on your computer. This is only for anonymous browsing though; it won’t protect you from malware.
One of the underlying differences from other browsers is that Chrome has separate processes running for each tab. So say you have multiple tabs open and you are opening a large .pdf file in one tab, and it crashes. With other browsers, you’d have to quit the entire program and the relaunch it (when this happens, Firefox asks you if you want to restore your tabs). In Chrome, the crash will only take down the tab you were loading the offending file to, and the other tabs will continue unaffected. I tried to test this out, but I couldn’t seem to get any tabs to crash.
Also, because each tab has it’s own processes running, there is a Windows-style task manager built in (Control the current page -> Developer -> Task Manager). This allows you to see a summary of each page that’s open with CPU and Memory usage for each. You can click on any page and then hit the “end process” button to quit that page. In the task manager, there is a link at the bottom that reads “Stats for nerds”. Clicking that will open a tab that shows the memory stats for each page open. If you have more than one browser open, it will show you the memory usage for all of them. I opened Firefox and IE and loaded the same pages in all three browsers. Consistently, IE used the most memory, with Chrome next, and Firefox using the least.
The other major feature is that Chrome comes with Google Gears included. Gears lets you use certain web services (such as Google Documents) offline. This allows you to work seamlessly with documents and spreadsheets from Google Docs and save them offline. Whenever you go to Google Docs online, it will synch the version stored on your computer to the one stored online. This enables you to use Google Docs for your office software even when you don’t have internet access. And Gears will work with other Gears-enabled websites too (like any site using Wordpress 2.6 or above). This is clearly part of Google’s attempt to gain market share from completely bludgeon Microsoft. Microsoft’s bread and butter has always been Windows and Office. The combination of Google Chrome and Google Documents allow you to have virtually the same functionality for free, with near-seamless integration between what you do online and offline.
Google is releasing Chrome as an open-source project too. So developers out there can add on to it as they see fit, or even use the code base to build their own custom browser.
Overall, I’d have to say I like it every bit as much as Firefox. I’m not sure I’ll switch over permanently though since Firefox is sort of the little guy in the browser wars and they’ve done so well thus far that I feel kind of loyal to them. I will keep trying Chrome for awhile though, to see if my first impressions are accurate.