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I’m writing this from Google’s new browser – Chrome. The beta was announced and released today. Currently you can download it for Windows only, but the full release will be for Mac OS and Linux as well.
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 wrap up from earlier today 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.
Chrome is clean. It is fast. It is intuitive.
Will it replace Firefox? For me, possibly. One feature I used immediately, 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 0xDECAFBAD 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.
Icrontic as a Chrome app
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.
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”.
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 PimpZilla skin for Firefox since forever. Leopard print, gold, and diamonds all the way!) I’m sure support will come after release.
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.
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