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All that sparkles isn't Chrome

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Posted By Neoco

So Google have signaled intent with the launch of their new internet browser that will take the fight to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer [yuk] and Mozilla’s FireFox [yay]. Here with his 2 cents (or pence, depending on your geo-code) is one our team developers, Wojciech…

Will Google chrome change anything in already overcrowded market? Does it delivers any better web experience? Will anyone still use it after driven by curiosity people will give it try? Hordes of bloggers trying to answer for those questions, here is one more attempt :-)

Feature set delivered by Chrome compared to Opera and Firefox seems to be quite limited – you will not find integrated email client or RSS reader, but it would be against Google philosophy – it encourages us to use web based gmail and reader, fine. Chrome doesn’t exactly show us any features we haven’t seen before, but it adds at least one important thing: most of you probably heard about Google gears but only small minority actually bothered to test this technology – to use it with IE or Firefox you need to download and install chunk of software and do we really want to clutter our machines even more in exchange of hypothetical benefits of gears? But chrome has this technology onboard – now when you open your Google Docs or Reader in chrome you might notice new small “offline” link in the top nav bar. Click it and chrome will cache your docs or RSS stories, then enjoy Slashdot, BBC Sport, Engadget or “Invoices pending payment” (whatever is your personal preference) in the cosy Jubilee Line train on your way home :-)

Will this feature will be enough to beat Firefox? In my opinion: no. Real power of Firefox are tons of plug-ins and add-ons, even if (”if” is the keyword here – waiting for someone to benchmark Chrome vs. others) Firefox is slightly slower or has larger memory footprint we will still use it as we love AdBlock, Live HTTP Headers or Firebug (OK, if you’re a not web developer your life might be complete without the latter two, and to be fair Chrome contains quite useful Element Inspector which covers part of features of Firebug).

Life goes on, masses of Windows users will stay (un)happy with IE, unless Google marketing department will persuade hardware manufactures to natively install Chrome and make it default browser. And users who can actually tell the difference between web browsers will continue love-hate relationship with Firefox.

This is beta version of Chrome – will we see update and Mac/Linux version anytime soon? Or will it stay in beta stage for years, as quite a few Google products we’ve seen?

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  • igor

    it’s interesting that you don’t compare chrome to safari, since it’s essentially a multi-threaded safari with a faster javascript vm and some other bits stripped off.

    the interface may be quite different, such as it’s method of presenting bookmarks, but the web would look almost exactly the same in the two.

    in my opinion:

    pros – much faster javascript vm means faster web apps (to google’s great delight), smaller memory footprint means it should stall less and let you do other things in the background, multi-threading means that tabs/windows don’t interfere and crash the entire thing (though i’d wonder how it would behave with lots of tabs and hence a large number of threads to manage – would you not see any benefit on a single core processor?)

    cons – i dislike the look, i’m too used to having a bookmark bar always available, i’ve heard strange things about the t&cs (you allow them to spy on everything you type? something like that), what’s the point of it anyway (other than to use their brand image to drive people away from ie)? if it’s primarily to increase the speed of their web apps, why not help incorporate their vm into safari or firefox?

    i’m slightly surprised that the various google apps are not bookmarked or linked to from their home page. every other browser does that to promote it’s websites and affiliates…

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