Google Chrome, accept a warm welcome from me

Truly!

Google Chrome, a brand new browser, written from scratch and thought from a different approach. It was announced to be released on 2nd of September, 2008, on the Official Google Blog and so it was. Yesterday, right after the conference held in Mountain View, CA, the officials of Google enabled the access of the public to the download url.

I’m writing this post using Chrome, and I have to admit, I’m impressed. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to load everything a bit faster. The pages I visit are usually Javascript heavy, so I guess the increased speed is the result of the V8 Javascript Virtual Machine and Gears’s new caching method’s (where available).

Let’s see some things about the browser.

Installation of Google Chrome

While everybody believed that the download of Chrome will be available from the Gears Home, Google dedicated a separate subdirectory on their main, Google.com domain, so currently the Google Chrome Official page is situated at www.google.com/chrome. On a side note, do not download Chrome from anywhere else. I encountered a website, the owners of it stated it’s an alternative download site but when I downloaded it to my crash-server (a PC used for testing malware and viruses), it contained only malware. So, be good and download ONLY from a Google domain.

After download, the installation was minimal as possible. It asked me if I want to import anything from Firefox, then if I want to set it as default browser. And then it was done. That was all.

First impressions

I started it with a little fear in me, I was excited to see the innovation but feared my sites will not load correctly. The default home page is something similar to Opera’s default home page: it displays some thumbnails of the most visited pages and a search box which enables you to search in your history. I never use my browse history so it’s not so interesting for me, probably it’s good for others.

I opened a new tab to see how fast a new tab loads. Incredibly fast. Also, a great idea is that every single tab has its own search bar, a so called omni-box. Why omni-box? Because it has multiple purposes. It’s an URL box where you can type the URL you want to access, a search box to search on your favorite search engine set in the options, and a box which tries to guess what you want. Just to mention that with almost no luck.

With a great fear in me, i typed in the omni-box: http://devoracles.com
I expected to have some design issues. But everything loaded correctly, what a pleasure.
I also visited rapidly a few dozen other page, but none had issues. I think this is the result of the WebKit the developers of Chrome used as rendering engine. It’s present in other browsers too, in Safari if I’m not mistaken, and so if something works in another browser which has WebKit as base, it will work in Chrome too.
This is very good for developers, as we don’t have to check everything in one more browser. If it works in Chrome or Safari, it’s OK.

I knew that I can stop any process of Chrome without the need of stopping the whole browser. That’s true. Chrome has its own task manager from where you can stop any tab you want with one single click. You can also use Windows’s task manager, but in this case you have to rely on your own instincts. Why? Task manager lists every instance of Chrome, the only issue is that it lists only “chrome.exe”, no other information. Currently I have two Chrome windows opened, each has eight tabs, so in windows manager I have 18 chrome.exe . How will I guess which one to close, I have no idea.

The incognito window was a great idea for privacy addicts. If you open a webpage in an Incognito Window, nothing will be stored on your PC which can be tracked. I refer to cookies or browsing history entries. Of course, if you bookmark a page or download something in an Incognito Window, that will remain available after you close the window, but nothing else. An interesting thing I noticed when I’ve opened an Incognito window, is the warning Google placed on the home page:

Be wary of:

• Websites that collect or share information about you
• Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
• Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
• Surveillance by secret agents
• People standing behind you

As per Google’s statements, the memory usage should be better than in any other browser because Chrome handles very efficiently the memory freed up by closed tabs, or the trash memory. Now this is something I didn’t notice yet. So far Chrome uses way more memory than any other browser I ever used.

The minimalistic design of Google’s applications is reflected on their browser too. Not that it’s a problem. The UI is very appealing and comfortable. It was very easy to learn what can be done from where.

The developers have their own tools incorporated into Chrome. If you are familiar with FireBug, you will easily recognize the same features in Chrome’s developer tools. But! For some reason this is a bit more complicated. May I say overcomplicated? While using FireBug was a pleasure, using Chrome’s developer tools is like a pain in the… in the… finger. For some reason I have the feeling that the developers who were responsible for the Dev Tools thrown everything in a case, mixed it then released. I find hard to get some things working, like the Inspector. It should highlight the HTML inner elements if I hover over them, but it seems it highlights only things it has mood for.
The Javascript debugger and the Javascript Console was also implemented in FireFox before so that’s not new at all.

As per Google’s agreement with Mozilla about the Search Giant’s indirect support of the Firefox browser, which by the way brings Mozilla some incredibly high revenue, has been renewed and will expire only in 2011. So, I think the final and stable version of Chrome will be released only then. No. That’s not plausible cos there are almost 3 years till then, even a snail with Alzheimer disease would release a stable browser in that time. (well, except Microsoft, but that’s another post for another time).
I would be incredibly happy if somebody would enlighten me why Google supports a competitor’s browser when they have their own browser

In general and considering that Chrome is a Beta (version is 0.2.149.27) I think it’s an awesome browser. It has some things which can be optimized and I’m sure the developers of Chrome will do optimize it.