Review of Google Chrome
September 15th, 2008 Posted in Technology, Nerds | No Comments »Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few weeks, Google has finally released a browser of their own, and it’s called Chrome. As is explained in the launch-accompanying 30 page comic, Chrome is a little bit new and different. While on the surface, the primary changes are tabbed browsing as a part of the core user experience, under the hood (cars have chrome right?) it’s quite a bit cooler than that.
The Good: You see, the tabs ARE the core! Each tab runs in its own process instead of in it’s own thread off of amain process. In addition to this, they keep track of all the little bits (literally) of a webpage in memory, so when you leave that page, they can clear it COMPLETELY. My personal favorite thing about chrome is that it doesn’t run JavaScript as a part of the rendering thread, so if it hangs, no biggie. Ok, ok, ok, so what does this mean for you? It means that webpages, secifically webapps (things like google docs, meebo, and facebook that offer some interactivity) will run at a bareable if not downright snappy pace. I have noticed a distinct speedup on facebook in particular which is great for me because I build facebook apps so I’m in there all day.
The Bad: So few things, I’ll put them in bullets points:
- It only runs on Windows. Grrrrr… Why is it that every time I get ready to jump off the diving board of Windows into the deep-end of Linux something always drags me back? Google wants to hit the most people the fastest, so they developed for Windows first. It makes sense people.
- It has no add-ons. This is probably a combination of Google wanting to maintain very tight security, and it being still quite an early product. As a web developer though, I miss certain things like colorpicker, view source chart, and ruler.
- It doesn’t support live bookmarks. I don’t get this at all. Considering all that Chrome ripped off (in a good way) from Mozilla, Opera, and Internet Explorer, why not this simple and incredibly useful bit of functionality? I am an avid Del.Icio.Us user, and I keep all my browsers in sync by live bookmarking my rss stream of bookmarks, with Chrome I have to actually hit the web page. Lame, but not terrible.
The Ugly: If you are an average computer user, (a non-developing windows user who loves webapps) jump in and get your feet wet! If not, you might wanna wait for the second release.













