Introducing Google Chrome
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
<p>I'm writing this from Google's new browser - Chrome. The beta was announced and released <a href="http://google.com/chrome">today</a>. Currently you can download it for Windows only, but the full release will be for Mac OS and Linux as well.</p>
<p>I'm not going to delve into the philosophy or the business case behind Chrome - there are plenty of other talking heads who will do that. You can read my <a href="http://icrontic.com/news/the_google_chrome_pre-beta_roundup">wrap up from earlier today</a> if you want links to some of them. The web will be awash with opinions as to the genius and stupidity of every move Google makes. Instead, I will be talking about my experiences with Chrome.</p>
<p>Chrome is clean. It is fast. It is intuitive. </p>
<p>Will it replace Firefox? For <em>me</em>, possibly. One feature I used <em>immediately</em>, and one from which I may never return, is the ability to open a tab as an "application". I remember the first time I used tabbed browsing within Firefox. That was the day I ceased to use IE - because it was so compelling that I couldn't imagine going back to the 'old way'. I think tabs-as-apps is similar. I already have a desktop shortcut to Icrontic.com. When I Alt-Tab, Icrontic.com is in the launcher. I haven't delved into the implications yet, but my gut feeling is "this is something". L.M. Orchard from <a href="http://decafbad.com">0xDECAFBAD</a> says, "Best not to think of Chrome as another browser. Rather, think of it as one of the first "Web OS" window managers." This is very telling. Chrome has its own task manager, plugins run in their own process, tabs run in their own process, and Chrome generally acts like a GUI for an OS, not just a browser. The line has blurred considerably.</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/draco/images/news/2008/09/icronticapp.jpg" alt="" />
<p class='caption'>Icrontic as a Chrome app</p></div><p>The "omnibox" (a name I cringe to type) just.. works. After I let Chrome import all my Firefox stuff, I type "I" into the box and hit enter and Icrontic.com is right there. Not because it's alphabetical but because it's the "I" that I most often go to. Chrome is supposed to 'learn' your browsing behaviors and adapt to it. The end result is that I am going to places more intuitively and faster than I used to. One major problem I've had with Firefox 3 is the length of time the address bar takes to enumerate all possibilities of where I want to go. There have been times I've wanted to go back to version 2 just because of it.</p>
<p>Chrome is noticeably faster. I went to my online banking page and it was WAY faster than in Firefox. The sites visit the most are all definitely faster. Today in the announcement presentation they threw some benchmark numbers out there showing how much faster Chrome was than IE. Anecdotally, I will tell you "it's faster".</p>
<p>I have some minor complaints. Selecting text is a bit difficult for me. I couldn't easily drag a specific part of a paragraph in a text box and select it. It kept wanting to select the whole chunk. I ended up using the shift-and-arrow keys from the days of yore to navigate around the text box to select exactly what I wanted. I don't necessarily enjoy the color scheme, and while I realize they probably won't have skin support in a beta, at least let me change the colors from the default blue. Some sites don't look great with the blue bars, and it doesn't match my windows theme that well. I'm a sucker for bling (I've been using the <a href="http://www.pimpzilla.nl/">PimpZilla skin</a> for Firefox since forever. Leopard print, gold, and diamonds all the way!) I'm sure support will come after release.</p>
<p>As with any new browser, of course you'll all download it and see. It all boils down to a matter of opinion. Some of my Icrontic friends swear by Opera. It never "clicked" for me. Others still use IE. I don't get it. Many of you (especially the developers among us) will be sticking with Firefox because of all the developer plugins. But there are those, like me, who will probably be switching to Chrome, because the feature set is compelling and it just feels better.</p>
<p>I'm not going to delve into the philosophy or the business case behind Chrome - there are plenty of other talking heads who will do that. You can read my <a href="http://icrontic.com/news/the_google_chrome_pre-beta_roundup">wrap up from earlier today</a> if you want links to some of them. The web will be awash with opinions as to the genius and stupidity of every move Google makes. Instead, I will be talking about my experiences with Chrome.</p>
<p>Chrome is clean. It is fast. It is intuitive. </p>
<p>Will it replace Firefox? For <em>me</em>, possibly. One feature I used <em>immediately</em>, and one from which I may never return, is the ability to open a tab as an "application". I remember the first time I used tabbed browsing within Firefox. That was the day I ceased to use IE - because it was so compelling that I couldn't imagine going back to the 'old way'. I think tabs-as-apps is similar. I already have a desktop shortcut to Icrontic.com. When I Alt-Tab, Icrontic.com is in the launcher. I haven't delved into the implications yet, but my gut feeling is "this is something". L.M. Orchard from <a href="http://decafbad.com">0xDECAFBAD</a> says, "Best not to think of Chrome as another browser. Rather, think of it as one of the first "Web OS" window managers." This is very telling. Chrome has its own task manager, plugins run in their own process, tabs run in their own process, and Chrome generally acts like a GUI for an OS, not just a browser. The line has blurred considerably.</p>
<div class="figure"><img src="/draco/images/news/2008/09/icronticapp.jpg" alt="" />
<p class='caption'>Icrontic as a Chrome app</p></div><p>The "omnibox" (a name I cringe to type) just.. works. After I let Chrome import all my Firefox stuff, I type "I" into the box and hit enter and Icrontic.com is right there. Not because it's alphabetical but because it's the "I" that I most often go to. Chrome is supposed to 'learn' your browsing behaviors and adapt to it. The end result is that I am going to places more intuitively and faster than I used to. One major problem I've had with Firefox 3 is the length of time the address bar takes to enumerate all possibilities of where I want to go. There have been times I've wanted to go back to version 2 just because of it.</p>
<p>Chrome is noticeably faster. I went to my online banking page and it was WAY faster than in Firefox. The sites visit the most are all definitely faster. Today in the announcement presentation they threw some benchmark numbers out there showing how much faster Chrome was than IE. Anecdotally, I will tell you "it's faster".</p>
<p>I have some minor complaints. Selecting text is a bit difficult for me. I couldn't easily drag a specific part of a paragraph in a text box and select it. It kept wanting to select the whole chunk. I ended up using the shift-and-arrow keys from the days of yore to navigate around the text box to select exactly what I wanted. I don't necessarily enjoy the color scheme, and while I realize they probably won't have skin support in a beta, at least let me change the colors from the default blue. Some sites don't look great with the blue bars, and it doesn't match my windows theme that well. I'm a sucker for bling (I've been using the <a href="http://www.pimpzilla.nl/">PimpZilla skin</a> for Firefox since forever. Leopard print, gold, and diamonds all the way!) I'm sure support will come after release.</p>
<p>As with any new browser, of course you'll all download it and see. It all boils down to a matter of opinion. Some of my Icrontic friends swear by Opera. It never "clicked" for me. Others still use IE. I don't get it. Many of you (especially the developers among us) will be sticking with Firefox because of all the developer plugins. But there are those, like me, who will probably be switching to Chrome, because the feature set is compelling and it just feels better.</p>
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Comments
So comments. I don't see it as a replacement for IE. For 1 key reason. The only reason I use IE is for those sites that require IE. Chrome runs no better on those sites then Firefox - or any other browser does. Which means for those sites you'll still be hitting up IE, at least for the time being. For businesses in particular that use the Outlook Web Access client. IE is still needed to gain access to more advanced features.
Which means that Chrome is competing directly with Firefox for my daily use. To that end Firefox, for me, has 2 advantages. The first is that it's cross platform. However that is only a temporary fix until Chrome leaves beta mode. The other are the pluggins. I can probably do without most plug-ins except browser sync. Love it, in fact can't do without it. I could probably come up with a work around but that's not the point.
As a first step goes Chrome seems to be on the right track. It's certainly not coming in feeling as a [functional] light way. It works and works well. I'm really looking forward to see where it goes and I also expect that I'll be dropping firefox in favor of Chrome in the near future. One other plug-in it's lacking that I've (sadly) grown dependent on is a built in spell checker.
I think IE will continue to sit where it is in the browser wars battle for the conceivable future. The real knock down drag-out fight is going to be between Chrome and Firefox.
For what it's worth, this is also kind of like what Mozilla and others have done with "single-site browsers". Chrome is doing it more seamlessly, though there is a beta Firefox extension to spin off a website into a standalone app shortcut.
Here are some other apps for Firefox, Safari, and MSIE respectively:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/
http://fluidapp.com/
http://bubbleshq.com/
I'm hoping this puts some pressure on Mozilla Labs and the rest to put more time into this concept, since I do think it's one of the many compelling features of Google Chrome.
I love it. In fact, right now, I've got the following sites open as separate apps in my dock:
- Gmail (home email)
- Zimbra (work email)
- live105.com audio player
- WordPress admin (decafbad.com)
- Google Reader
- Google Docs
Very cool stuff.Also... beer.
It was a one-two punch of beer and subsequent tweets that brought me round.
The colour scheme, much like prime mentioned, is for me. Hopefully future customization will be provided with the browser.
Lastly, I just would like to add that I think I will be using this browser far into the future if Google plans to continue development for Chrome, which pretty certainly going to happen.
"NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG PLEASE. NO BAD GOOGLE APPS. THRAX, PLEASE LOOK AT THE RED LIGHT..."
I love the minimalist interface. It's missing mouse gestures, but I'm sure with time that will come. Rendering speed seems better than FF on certain sites. No crashing for me yet, no noticeable bugs, but I think that's because I really haven't run it through its paces yet. I'm going to do my typical run of sites, open several tabs, check memory usage, rendering speed, etc.
I even used Privacy mode
Edit: OH GOD I CAN EDIT THE TEXT BOX SIZE FOR THESE THINGS!? OH GOD!
I use the NoScript plugin with Firefox and it allows the user to select whether to temporarily allow or permanently allow scripts by domain. I seriously hate just how many scripts are running on most websites today. Icrontic is a positive example. I can set NoScript to permanently allow Icrontic.com and the site works. In order to get a site like Gizmodo, for example, to work properly, I'd have to enable scripts on no less than three of the six domains from which the site runs scripts. The other three domains seem to run scripts that either serve advertising content or farm user behavior data, but don't add anything to the functionality of the site.
I wish the trend that the web is taking was not directly toward more scripts from more domains being run on any given website. Chrome seems to be not only recognizing this trend, but seeks to make it more efficient to perform.
Welcome to Web 2.0 :bigggrin: If you really want to maintain granular personal control over scripting on pages through something like NoScript, Chrome will not be your favorite browser.
IMHO, resisting JavaScript is a losing battle these days with any browser, but Chrome is actively designed to embrace scripting on the web. Chrome really is like a window manager for web apps, and it's made to further enable things like Gmail and Zimbra—which are all dripping in JavaScript.
And, it's more efficient to serve up and cache scripts from different domain shared across products, so that's not going away either.
As for AdBlock, well, I wouldn't be surprised if such a plugin was a long time coming. Especially since Google's bread & butter come from ads. I'm sure a 3rd party will build it, and the browser will be open source so Google can't really sneak anything in to hinder ad blocking—but I doubt they'll be all that helpful in building an AdBlock.
Unfortunately, JS is also used in poor or distinctly malicious ways. But, such is the nature of any powerful scripting language. There's also an abundance of incomprehensibly bad JS applets out there, but that's like saying water is wet.
Their implementations of Javascript are far more suspect (I'm looking at you, IE) but at least with frameworks we don't have to worry about it anymore. Rather than standardizing their implementations, they're speeding up the frameworks that fix their implementations and bypass the stalled standards. Oh well, I'll take what I can get.
I find myself considerably worried about privacy in Chrome. Privacy is a major concern in IE - it tracks things on the OS level. I don't see how using Chrome is much better, when Google has a vested interest in knowing what I'm doing on the web. I've noted people saying that there is no IP-masking in Chrome. Sure, I'll run Google Apps in it if it does that faster. It's a nice little GUI for keeping my Gmail open all day; cool. I'll stick it in TrayIt and be done. However, for normal browsing, Firefox it is and shall remain.
I really like Firefox. It's fast, lightweight, customizable, and I know exactly what's going on with it. Even when Chrome has been fully vetted, we may be months (years?) away from it comparing to the sheer scope of Firefox's potential. My entire workflow on the web is organized around Firefox and the many extensions I have installed to make my life easier.
I should think that we're vastly more likely to see Chrome's cool features cannibalized into Firefox long before Chrome does the reverse. With the exception of sites-as-apps, there are add-ins for Firefox that already grant it much of Chrome's functionality. That neat start page is replicated with the Fast Dial addon.
And the echo of privacy: I'm pretty cautious about what I give out on the internet. I don't like the worry of THE MAN, whose vested interest is in advertising, to be powering my browser with accelerated support for primarily-java ad cycles. Boo.
From an aesthetics standpoint, flipping the bird to Windows UI conventions has me fairly peeved. In fact, programs that don't use the Windows shell and enforce a skin of their own have me peeved. I want the title bar, title text and open/close/minimize to be in the same place every time. I want them to be the same shape and inherit the properties of the active Windows theme. The desire to be hip and edgy has meant Google has abandoned what few UI laws Windows has, and it's a distraction for me. I place a very large emphasis on aesthetic uniformity and presentation, to such an extent that my desktop is very, very customized. Winamp skins, window theme, browser theme... They all match for a reason. Now I have this blueberry of a browser that doesn't fit. Boo again.
Lastly, I am a stickler for resources. A fresh install of Chrome with just one open tab gobbled up about 45MB of RAM. A Firefox process with 5 open tabs, two of which with flash and heavy java, consumed just 65mb. What gives, Google? Give me my RAM.
This.
(dangit. Just realized that ctrl+B no longer bolds in Chrome, but rather pulls up the bookmark bar. meh.)
I really like Chrome so far. Very clean, very fast, eye candy where it counts.
But Prime is right, for dev sake, I'll need to stick around Firefox. But general browsing, for now anyways, will be done on Chrome.
Any word on if Google plans to make Chrome extensible? That would be perfect.
Glad it spellchecks, wish it would offer correction suggestions.
And wow Miracleman, I about crapped myself when I resized my text box.
The rollover popup on topics, as PurplezArctic mentioned, is awesome and a very welcome feature. I had lots of problems with said popup in FF, sometimes having to 'sneak' my cursor in to get the popup. No such problem yet in Chrome.
But what we really need to look at with Chrome is the bigger picture and the long run. It's a bit of a revolution, in sense, that Google built it from the ground up around the concept of web applications. This is so huge. As the web continues to revolve around apps, Chrome will be the one browser ahead, at least in this point of time, of Mozilla, Microsoft, and others.
This is a change that browsers need. Hopefully Mozilla steps up and overhauls FF in the same manner. This is sort of akin to the change Microsoft should make with Windows. Overhaul from the ground up and build around new technologies and trends.
I'm excited for what this means for web browsers. It's certainly a step in the right direction.