Obligatory Chrome post… now with review!
2008-09-09 / 22:00 / dave
It’s official!
HTTP_USER_AGENT:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.29 Safari/525.13
What’s to like
Most obviously: it’s fast. Javascript is super responsive; Gmail feels like a desktop app–unsurprising given Google’s design goals. The browser itself is pretty quick too. I didn’t bother running any half-assed benchmarks, but opening & switching tabs is noticeably faster than Firefox. (Which, as an aside, serves as a nice reminder that planning for performance isn’t the same as prematurely optimizing. Performance matters.)
Speaking of tabs, Google makes a big deal about Chrome being designed around the tab. I don’t really get much use out of the new-tab page but the ability to drag tabs out of a window is nice. Firefox let’s you drag tabs back and forth, but you have to manually create the window first. Firefox also doesn’t show you a cool thumbnail of the tab contents while dragging. Simple, but very useful.
The only time I open new windows manually is via Ctrl-Shift-N: incognito mode. I’m sure this will be useful for the politically repressed, but mostly I spend time on Persian Kitty.
Speaking of porn, looking at high-resolution web-design porn is nice thanks to the minimal interface. Despite the gimmicky sound of “we wanted to reduce the ‘Chrome’ of Google Chrome”
(link) there really is less clutter:
It’s also got some features that make browsing easier, like drag and drop file uploading and font scaling. The font scaling isn’t as good as Firefox: it doesn’t have the new Cairo-backed Firefox image rescaling so scaling distorts pages. Similarly Chrome’s drag and drop uploading can’t handle multiple files like dragdropupload (though, to be fair, that’s a plug-in). Last but not least, Chrome’s got resizeable text-areas. Amazing!
For the developers, Chrome’s view source has line numbers and live links that open in a new tab. It’s also got a built-in DOM inspector.
Oh, and, despite the pile of bugs it doesn’t crash.
Ok, what’s not to like
The missing functionality: ChatZilla, DownThemAll, Multiproxy Switch, Tabs Menu, etc.
The placement of new tabs can be a bit strange. Ctrl-T tabs go to the end. When clicking links from a tab, they open directly to the right of the current tab. If you click a bunch from the current tab, they open left to right. But something–not sure if it’s scrolling the page or changing focus or what–resets the order. So you open a bunch of tabs in order. Then a bunch more get prepended to that list. Definitely not a show-stopper.
And… the ugly?
Chrome is beautiful. It’s got the same well-designed simplicity of other Google products or anything from Apple (at least from what I’ve seen tangentially, I’ve got a $25 MP3 player, a Samsung cell phone and a Thinkpad). And it’s open source (WebKit plus Google’s own V8 javascript engine) so you don’t feel immoral using it.
But… but… it’s got no plugins.
A long time ago I was a devoted Opera user. I even paid for it! I didn’t switch to Firefox until there were plugins for better tab management and gestures. True, I could have flexed some open-source muscle and just changed Firefox’s source code…
Yeah, right.
Firefox managed to produce a tinkerer culture. Can Chrome do the same? Of course, I’m assuming a tinkerer culture is good. Maybe “closed & beautiful” is better.
Then there’s Ubiquity. If you missed the mini-buzz before Chrome stole it’s glory,Ubiquity is a Firefox plugin that let’s you script web tasks via Javascript scripting. It’s bookmarklets on steroids. Watch the video, it’s kind of awesome. I had more to say about it, but Mr. Jackson says it better.
Finally I’ve seen some comments about Chrome sniping Mozilla’s marketshare. I’m sure that’s a minority opinion, but it’s still a ridiculous one. Chrome is innovative. Putting that innovation in a brand new product instead of pushing it into Firefox is a design decision, not an attack. Time will tell if it was the right one.
In the meantime the release of Chrome has at least got people talking about the browser, which is a good thing and, incidently, one of Google’s goals.
Download it yourself
Oh yeah, I guess a link would be nice: Chrome
PS
I thought I’d try out a gratuitous use of highlighter to see if it makes the blog more scannable. Let me know!
I wondered how the no-plugins thing would go over, but since I’m not a Windows user, I haven’t had a chance to take a peek to see what’s baked in Chrome already. :-) Ironically enough, I’ve been a plain-vanilla Firefox user for a long time. Other than Google Gears and VideoDownloader, I didn’t use any plugins…until Ubiquity came along. I got seriously geeked about it, even wrote a stupid little command for it…and then everyone sorta went, “Yeah, Ubiquity, that’s pretty aweso…Ooo! Google Chrome! Shiny! Woo!”
I dig the idea of a process-per-tab architecture, tho. That’s a huge win.
BTW, the highlighting’s a nice touch. Didn’t see it till I came from Google Reader to comment. :-)
Cheers,
John P.
Have you used Safari? I’ve seen a few threads that attribute most of Chrome’s good things to WebKit/Safari.
I like the idea of process-per-tab (& sandboxing, etc.) theoretically, but I don’t know how much it saves me from crashes. In the days I’ve been using Chrome, I haven’t had any tabs crash. I wonder if some of the stability isn’t just better code.
I’ve been switching between Chrome and Firefox since Chrome was available. I miss my FF plugins, Firebug most of all. The dev tools in Chrome are pretty decent, but I’m more comfortable in Firebug at the moment.
I agree that the tab process management (and the new JS engine) are the big wins for Chrome.
Oh, I miss being able to do the ol’ Vim “/” to start a text search, something FF does have.
Huh, never knew about “/”. Not enough to make me switch back, though :)
[...] waxing poetically about chrome, I’ve hit a few more snags. So now… THE [...]