Structured Thought . ORG

I’ve been running Google Chrome for a little while now, and it’s already beginning to supplant Firefox (3.0.x) as my primary browser (Internet Explorer hasn’t been a serious player in my book since Firebird 0.5). There are still a few things that will make me keep Firefox around for a while, yet.

1. Extensions - Firefox is the king of extensibility. I just can’t live without adblock, TwitterFox, and FoxMarks. Once reasonable equivalents begin to make thier way in, though. It’s going to be harder for Firefox to hang on to my system.
2. Supportability – A lot of sites don’t yet support Chrome, and give the good old “You’re using an unsupported browser, please use one of these…” message, even though the rendering engine is the same as Safari (Woopra’s monitoring script detects Chrome as Safari, even). This is a minor thing that will be fixed in due time.
3. Scrolling Issues – Scrolling using the edge of a touch pad, or by middle-clicking on the page are currently not working. This is pretty minor, as most of the time, I’m using a mouse, but it can be problematic when I’m expecting it to work and nothing happens.
4. Security – There are a couple of vulnerabilities in the version of WebKit that’s being used in current builds. These have been addressed in later builds, and it will be nice to have them implemented as things progress.

Other than these things, which are really minor for a .2-level product that has been out for 3 days, Chrome is a truly fantastic piece of engineering. I have heard from more than a couple of Googlers that they have been using earlier builds internally for quite a while. It’s nice to know that they eat the proverbial dog food before serving it to the rest of us. It really shows that they are committed to creating something with real quality, usability, and future usability.

One more thing, I think I kind of touched on this in the last post: Chrome (under the Chromium project) is OpenSource, meaning anyone can download all of the code written so far (minus the Google Trademarked stuff), and create their own browser project. It seems that Google is hoping for this to happen, counting on the Open Source community to make improvements and push them back into Google’s development stream.

The next few months are going to be interesting. I can’t wait.

I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser for about 30 minutes now, and I just wanted to give people a few points of interest that I’ve found so far.

Rendering: This thing is unbelievably fast. I was impressed with the recode of Gecko that was released with FireFox 3, but the Webkit backend of Chrome is nothing short of insane. Gecko managed to expose what I call download lag (the time it takes for the first renderable chunk of HTML to come down from a server), but Chrome has managed to hang it out for all to see. Even historically fast pages now show some download lag because the rendering engine in Chrome literally snaps pages into place when they’re loaded.

Features: The ability to pop a browser window out and use it as a discreet application on your computer is phenomenal. Using GMail as an example, it really makes the web application feel as though you’re using something you actually installed. Couple that with the increased rendering speed of Chrome, and you have something that approaches or, in some cases, exceeds the performance of desktop applications.

Compatibility: This is something ongoing, and will improve over time, but even now, I’m having trouble finding a site that won’t render properly. I have been hearing scattered reports about plugins not working, but that’s about it so far.

Extensibility: It’s OpenSource. Don’t like it? Fix it. Want a new feature? Create it.

Security and Stability: Every tab has its own discreet process on the system. This keeps web pages from bringing down the entire browser when something goes wrong. It also appears to make memory management easier, as freed memory is flushed better than when the browser is re-using memory segments. This should show great benefits as power users that open tabs continuously don’t lose performance as quickly (or at all, as is the possibility)

I plan on playing with this a lot over the next few days, so keep checking back here for more details.

Google scores huge with this one.