All the talk Google’s new browser is getting on Twitter is a little dizzying. People have been both terribly excited about it and pooh-pooh’ing it for the past 12(ish) hours that it has been available to the public. It’s not like anyone in this line of work didn’t see it coming, it’s just a little hard to believe that it’s finally here.
Enough on the build-up, what about the browser man? Fine, Google Chrome as they call it ends up being a very impressive piece of software, if incomplete. If you’re rockin’ Windows, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go download it yourself, but if you’re just here to take my word for it, I’ll keep it short. TechRepublic has a short post on cool things in Chrome or you could get the long of it in webcomic form. I’m not doing any screenshot work because there’s so much out there and I’m lazy.
I am going to spend a moment to mention the problems I’ve found with it so far. You’ve discovered a cool new webcomic that you’d like to subscribe to in Google Reader? You’re using Chrome? Too bad, Chrome has no idea what RSS or Atom are. You’re out of luck, son. Maybe you’re really attached to your extentions in Firefox? It’s the standard situation here, you’re just going to have to deal with life without them. Just found yourself a nice new background? You gotta do it the slow way (save to pictures folder, find it, then set as background). All of these are fairly trivial in that you would expect this kind of thing for:
- Browsers that are not Firefox (in the case of extentions), or:
- Any software not yet at 1.0 status, which Chrome is clearly not
I also had trouble on Facebook. Some of the javascript powered links just didn’t work at all (i.e. leaving a comment on someone’s status update, removing an application). This might not be entirely Chrome’s fault though. I remember having an identical issue with Firefox 3 beta releases that mysteriously fixed itself between releases.
Over all, the feeling I get from Chrome is that it’s some sort of weird Google version of Safari with heavy influence from Firefox. Of course, that’s a good thing in my book. It does feel a lot faster than FF3 (that’s saying a lot) and there are a couple of really nice ideas here, separate tab processes being both the most revolutionary and my personal favorite. The implementaion still has some non-essential features to add and some bugs to squash, but there’s no reason to not have it as a secondary to Firefox. Really, I think this tweet just about has it nailed: Chrome makes you feel like you’re playing with internet Play-doh.
