Google Chrome – Web Browser

3 Sep, 2008 Software, Stuff I Like, Tech

Yesterday, September 2nd, 2008, Google Inc. launched their own web browser called Chrome. The release itself was rather unique because the day before the browser was available for download Google released a comic book that explained what it was and what made it better than the other browsers in the market today.

So you say, “big deal another browser, how many of these things do I need?” Well as far as I am concerned you only need one, unless you do web development and then you need them all. Is Chrome the one?… not yet, but it has major potential. It’s design is totally different from the other browsers which evolved with the web, it benefits from being built for the web we deal with now.

Key Features:

Tabs are “sandboxed” each tab runs as an independent process, if something in a tab crashes you don’t have to restart the whole browser and sacrifice the other tabs that were open and running.

It’s fast, because it’s lean (and there are no add-ons for it yet) and because of the new V8 javascript engine.

Better memory management as a result of the independent tab processes. When a tab is closed that memory is immediately freed to do something else, unlike Firefox or IE.

The Omni-Bar, like Firefoxes “Awesome” Bar it auto-fills as you type, the benefit here is that it does not suggest every url you have ever visted, just the ones you have typed in. It also serves as your window to search engines.

Google Gears is built right in which makes interfacing with Google Docs, Gmail and Wordpress even speedier.

It’s built on Apple’s WebKit. (Which of course begs the question why no Mac support yet?)

What it lacks right now are the plugins we all know and love from Firefox and I was slightly dissapointed that there is no Mac or Linux version yet and no release date either.

So far I am really happy withe the performance and have not seen any problems with rendering web pages. I love the tear off tabs, which lets me group them into different windows based on content. The Omni -bar seach is really great too, type the letter g and hit tab and it turns into Google Search. It’s had the benefit of being tested against the Google database of websites before it’s release which has allowed them to release a fairly stable beta.

Google needs to get into gear and get the Mac and Linux versions out and get the plugin developers moving if it want’s to survive. I really miss CoolIris and Scribefire.