Google Chrome – Shiny, but not there yet

Google's new browser - "Chrome"

Google have released a new internet browser out into the wild : “Google Chrome” – to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. There’s a little bit of confusion around exactly why Google would want to do that given that they are deeply involved with Mozilla Firefox: both in developers and cash, but it starts making sense once you use it. This browser is fast. And it’s especially fast for applications with a lot of Javascript – GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc. It has a shiny new Javascript virtual machine running under the hood, and it works a treat. Beautiful.

So, here’s the Geoff wrap up in a few short points:

Why You Would Use It

• Makes fantastic use of screen real estate – barely takes up any room at all which means you’ve got tons of room on the screen for the stuff you actually care about.  More stuff fits on your screen, which means you have to scroll less, which makes the world a happier place
• Freaking fast – I’ve said it already but this canes the buttocks off either of the big two browsers just in terms of speed.
• Default Home Page – Every time you open a new tab in Chrome, instead of a blank screen, the page shows a grid of your most visited sites that are accessible with the click of a mouse. Because this is driven completely locally, you’re not waiting for the homepage to load up over a slow connection – it just works. Sure it’s probably stolen from Opera, but it’s a good idea
• It’s Google – and they make good stuff. The big positive about Google is that they have a philosophy of “release early then iterate”, meaning that the failures of today will likely not be there tomorrow.

Why You Wouldn’t Use It (at least all the time)

• No RSS Support – now I realise that this might not mean a lot for some of you, but there are a bunch of us that this will raise alarm bells for. Not only do you not get the cute little feed icon showing up in the address bar of a relevant site, but if you click on an RSS feed link, you just get garbled junk.
• Missing features – because it’s early days, there are a few features that are easy to get used to in Firefox that feel missing in Chrome. Ironically for a Google product, Chrome doesn’t have a search bar, but instead has you typing search queries into the address bar, which seems to me to be a little counter-intuitive. Maybe I just need to get over it
• No extensions – For a long time Firefox user, this is a bit of a sad one. Extensions are pluggable bits of code that magically do fun (or useful) things to your browser to add functionality. At this stage there’s nothing like that for Chrome, and while I think that’ll change, for the moment that’s a deal killer.
• It’s only on Windows at the moment, which means people who have a choice about their OS are unlikely to be able to use it yet.
• You might still be stuck in the Internet Explorer world where you didn’t realise you had a “web browser” other than the big blue e.

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