Ryan Sloan

On the First of September, Google “announced” (if you can call it that) the release of their new web browser: Chrome. They brought in famed comic artist Scott McCloud to illustrate a comic explaining the theory and reasons behind Chrome, and apparently, a few copies of the comic went out a bit too early. Nonetheless, Google scrambled to get the Chrome website up, and announced that it would be released on September 2nd. Unfortunately, there’s only a Windows version at this time, so I switched over to the red-headed stepchild partition, and downloaded the Beta. I’ve only been using it for a few hours, so these are just my first impressions.

Setup

Getting Chrome setup was about as quick and easy as it can be. It was a fast download (most of the install files are not downloaded until you run the executable) and a faster install. It requested that I close my instance of Firefox so that it could import my bookmarks and settings. The bookmarks and settings were imported fairly flawlessly — the bookmarks toolbar was identical, and the other bookmarks were retained as well. I lost my saved login credentials, but I didn’t have that many. Chrome starts up lightning fast — especially compared to my install of Firefox 3. When you start Chrome for the first time, you’ll see a pop-up regarding your default search engine. It defaults to Google, but you can change it immediately.

User Experience

Chrome’s UI differs from IE and Firefox in it’s simplicity. One thing you’ll notice is that there is no title bar at all. I see this as a positive feature, because you can devote more of your screen to page content instead of menus and toolbars, but opinions vary. There is also no “Search” box (as in IE and Firefox) but the address bar serves as both. Depending on what you enter in the address bar, Chrome will visit that page or perform a search with your default search engine. Once again, I like this idea. It may be because I have faith in Google to interpret my jibberish, but I think simpler is better. I do miss the Firefox search box, though. It was nice to have a dropdown of search engines to chose from. (Although appending site:url to your query works fine.) Another feature I think is neat is the “Incognito Window.” It works the same way as a standard window (multiple tabs are allowed) but when you close the window, all the temporary files (history, cache, cookies, etc.) from that session are deleted. This will be very valuable if you’re using a shared computer to access any sensitive information (banking, birthday shopping…I feel certain that incognito mode will be used for less noble purposes as well!)

Performance

Chrome was designed to eliminate a lot of the performance problems that have plagued tabbed browsing. Each tab runs as it’s own process, and the memory from that process can be freed after the tab is closed. In Firefox, a specific amount of memory is allotted at startup for N tabs, and once you reach tab N+1, it allocates another big chunk of memory. Because of this, there are some memory usage and fragmentation problems. The memory usage of Chrome isn’t very different from Firefox at first, but in theory, after continued use, it is considerably less resource hungry. Pages tend to load faster in Chrome as well. While I’m not sure of the exact reason for this, it makes sense that you’d see improved load times for JavaScript heavy pages because tabs are independent of one another — they don’t have to wait on a hung script to finish executing/crash. Of all the sites that I visited, I only noticed one that didn’t work properly. The “Advanced” version of Georgia Tech’s Zimbra webmail service did not load — it always reverted to “Standard Mode.” Advanced Mode is very AJAX-y, so I’m not sure if it’s a problem with Chrome or Zimbra. I have a feeling Zimbra’s doing a browser test, and it doesn’t really know what to make of Chrome, so it just switches to the no JS version to be safe.

Geeky Stuff

Chrome has some cool features for those of us with a flair for technology, as well. The developer area of the “Control the current page” menu has a couple of cool features. One is the JavaScript debugger and console. These are almost identical to Firebug. I haven’t noticed any significant improvements over Firebug yet, but I haven’t really played with the console much. There’s a cool resources tab that lets you monitor resource usage by JavaScript running in the current tab.

There’s also a task manager that allows you to monitor the Memory usage, CPU usage, and Network activity of each running tab. If you want more detailed statistics, you can point your browser to about:memory. This page will show you the Memory usage of each tab and plugin. There are a lot of statistics here. If you have any other browsers running, their memory usage stats will be displayed here as well.

Other

Flash - Flash worked right out of the box. I’m assuming it automatically picked up on the version used by another browser, but it was nice to have one less thing to install.

Application shortcuts - Okay, this is kind of neat. You can create an “Application Shortcut” on your desktop or start menu based on the current page. This isn’t exactly new, but what is neat is that when you launch the page in Chrome, it hides all the navigation bars and runs it like a standalone application. Once again, this takes up less screen space, and treats the web application more like a traditional desktop app. This isn’t very convenient for browsing, but I think it’s great for Web Applications. Google Docs comes to mind. It allows you to focus that window on one thing. The separate process gives you some crash protection, as well.

Summary

All in all, Chrome is pretty slick. I think there’s some considerable work to be done (Linux and Mac version, anyone?) but if they deliver on a lot of their promises I can see it taking off. If they implement good customization and add-on support (like Firefox) then I think we’ll start to see a lot of users moving towards Chrome.