few hours ago I wrote a blog post about google's chrome browser, now it has been released and I've spent a couple of hours toying around with it a bit.
You can read about the technical specs of the new browser here.
First impressions
The good
It's slick, the user interface is bare bones. No menu's to speak off no title bar, it starts with tabs and there are some browsing essential buttons (refresh, back, forward) the usual.
It's fast, loading pages feels fast, browsing through the pages also feels fast.
It includes its own taskmanager, this is ideal for flash ads slowing things down, when you have a lot of pages open with flash ads things tend to get slow, just kill it with the task manager and you've got speed back.
Autocompletion in the Javascript console
Best popupblocker implementation I've seen in a while.
Nice unintrusive downloadmanager.
If you need to use webmail, use this browser, thats basicly because the javascript engine is FAST.
Hotmail doesn't yet work with this browser or at least the advanced mode doesn't yet work with this browser,, but google's own gmail flies with it.
One of the early benchmarks for Chrome can be found here.
The bad
F1 = for help - not so in chrome.
View Source = right click + somewhere in the popup list - not so in chrome
The middle mouse button scroller is gone.
Memory usage is quite hefty, probably the biggest user of memory of current browsers. Firefox 2, might have used more.
I don't understand the autocompletion in the Javascript console.
Noooo, not another browser I need to test :(
My thoughts
The timing is right for this release, the most impressive thing about this browser is the Javascript engine which is currently the king of the round in terms of speed.
Problem for google is that Firefox is working on a new Javascript engine which will be a lot faster.
Safari, same thing.
Also the target market for this browser seems to be the people which aren't very technical, It has simplified browsing written all over it and that is a good thing :)
Google's browser will be launched tomorrow but there is already a lot known about the browser.
- It will use webkit which is already in use by: Safari, Konquerer, Google's Android, Nokia browser and some others.
- It will use a custom javascript engine named: v8 which is a VM based engine.
- Each tab will have it's own process, so when it crashes it only brings down the tab not the whole browser.
- There will be a task / process manager keeping track of all the processes and things happening with them including plugins used on a tab by tab base.
- An intelligent addressbar, same thing which is happening with IE8 / FF3
- New tabs will open an opera quickstart kind of page with 9 quick select slots and most used search terms
- No auto popups, popups will be confined to their own tabs (I smell problems here)
- Google Gears included
- Fully open source
My expectations are that this browser will become a very populair choice and will be eating away at Firefox market share in a pretty short time.
This also means that the webkit engine is one to be tested for with so many backers this engine will only continue to grow, and for me safari for windows seems pretty fast, which means that this browser will probably be even faster.