I have been using Chrome, Google’s new browser, for about a week now. I’ve been a Firefox fan for years, but I wanted to see what Chrome brings to the table.
Chrome, like other Google applications, employs a very simple interface. The traditional browser icon bar is gone. In its place is the address bar or what Google calls the “Omnibar”, requisite back/forward buttons, and two icons that organize various other functions. The Omnibar is similar to Firefox’s “Awesome Bar” in that it makes address suggestions based upon your bookmarks and browsing history. It also allows you to query Google, or other configurable search engines, too. The browser’s default start page shows thumbnails of your most visited pages. I particularly like Chrome’s sleek implementation of tabbed browsing. You can even drag tabs between browser windows!
Chrome definitely raises the bar for browser performance and stability. Each tab runs in its own process meaning that it has its own memory space. A session crashing in one tab will not bring down the entire browser. The browser employs a JavaScript engine, called V8, which significantly increases performance by compiling the script into machine code. I’ve noticed that JavaScript heavy web pages really benefit from the new engine.
One interesting topic worth noting is how Google tested browser builds. The Internet contains billions (if not trillions) of web pages. How does a development team test for compatibility? Well if you’re Google, you already have a crawler that indexes billions of pages. They simply attached the browser’s code to the indexer. Within 30 minutes of a software build, Google is able to test Chrome against thousands of different web pages. Other browser teams would have to wait until public beta to glean the amount of bug data that Google has access to.
As much as I like Chrome, it is definitely not my new default browser. It doesn’t have any RSS auto discovery and it currently lacks Firefox’s plugin functionality. I have definitely grown accustomed to my various Firefox plugins and I cannot function without them. With that said, Chrome is definitely a solid alternative to Internet Explorer and I’ll likely revisit it once plugins become available.
Chrome can be downloaded from here and is currently only available for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista. Google states that Macintosh and Linux versions are on the way.