In my line of work, it is critical that I am on top of all of the latest browsers and internet technologies. So when Google suddenly decided to release their own browser 2 days ago (called Chrome), I was right on top of it. I read the comic book intro for it while I was waiting for the download to be available (btw, awesome way to describe … well … anything – much more interesting than reading an article … hrm). Some of the features sounded really cool and smart. Some of them worried me a little (at least on a professional level). After using it (which I am right now to write this), most of my concerns were quickly abated and all of the features were as good as or better than I expected.
What is so great about Google Chrome (their unfortunately-named browser)? Well, there are several cool features – many borrowed from other current and future browsers, some uniquely their own. One of the best features is one that only real geeks would probably completely understand or appreciate – the browser isolates each browser tab to its own process. For the layman, this means that even though you might have 10 tabs open at once and they may appear to be within the one application, each one is handled in the background as a separate process thread. So if you go to a bad site in a tab and it hangs or crashes, you will only lose that tab. Also, this significantly improves memory allocation and garbage clean-up. Another great feature is one that they “borrowed” from Microsoft (something they are working on in their IE8 beta) – a private browsing mode. Google calls it “Incognito Mode” and in this mode, you can browse to one or multiple websites, get the same experience you would normal have, but when you are done and you close the “Incognito” window all cached files and cookies are expunged from your computer. They bill this as a good way to do, say, anniverary gift shopping so that your spouse won’t be able to check where you’ve visited. But most people I know have been referring to this as porn-mode.
As a developer, there are lots of features that come built-in that make this a great browser – almost as good as Firefox. It is fast, it uses very little memory to run, and most sites work and look normal in my experience (they say that if you’ve tested n Safari 3.1, then your site will look fine in Chrome). And I like their default new tab experience – you open a new tab and it shows you thumbnails of the top 9 sites you visit as well as a search field and a list of recently added bookmarks. The only thing that keeps me anchored to Firefox for the time-being is add-ons – there are several that I rely upon for the things that I do. But I’m sure it is only a matter of time before Google adds support for third-party add-ons and adopts something similar to (or maybe even better than) the Firefox model for this. Plus the whole thing is open-source, so someone could easily get the code and build a completely customized version and put it out there.
So in summary, I give it 2 thumbs up and I look forward to future updates to this browser. I am an early adopter and encourage others to give it a spin. If you do or already have, what is your favorite (or least favorite) feature. I think the least useful feature that I enjoy the most is what you get by typing about:internets in a tab.