Google Chrome
September 03, 2008
Google stepped into the browser market yesterday with Google Chrome after a rather novel introduction through a comic book. Now it’s certainly not groundbreaking when compared to other browsers in terms of features that users get to use/see, but technically, it’s rather good. (And I don’t just mean super fast!).
Every tab is a separate process, something which at first I thought was crazy. Turns out, that insulates the rest of the browser from a crashing/hanging tab, something which I’ve had happen a few times with firefox and safari. I’m pretty sure I read IE was doing something similar in version 8 but still, it’s a good feature.
Also, with javascript performance being focused on by all the browsers it makes sense that Google Chrome compete in this area too. Now I thought they would’ve just gone with SquirrelFish since it’s being incorporated into webkit (which chrome uses), but no. They’ve pulled in V8, made by a Danish team who are supposedly rather good when it comes to virtualizing laguages. The result is that in sunspider the benchmark most are using now, Google Chrome is about 30%-40% quicker than safari 4, at least that’s what I found in my brief testing, so it’s by no means definitive.
Then we get to the ui. There’s not a whole lot to it to be honest but I’ve got to say for some reason, I kinda like it. I was scared when I saw all the baby blue in the screenshots but it turns out in vista, all that blue is replaced with the glass frame and actually looks remarkably nice (by google’s standards anyway).
There’s a ton of other things too, a speed dial like interface when opening new tabs, which despite being blatantly pulled from Opera, actually works much better due to how it’s populated and the inclusion of search data. There’s also the way searching is handled via the omnibar, it’s surprisingly intuitive to use and makes searching any site you’ve visited previously quick and easy.
I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes as there’s clearly still room for improvement, especially with preferences which are somewhat sparse at the moment. But the browser is solid, I’ve had only one crash so far and that was when I decided to be silly with the number of tabs I had open and dare I say it, I think I might use it as my default in Vista for a while since since my needs are few in that OS.
Feedback?
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