Today Google released its new web browser called Google Chrome as a public beta, you can download it here.
You could ask why bother releasing a new browser when there’s IE 8 in beta, Firefox 3 recently released, Apple’s Safari and at least 10 people use Opera. They pre-empted this perfectly reasonable question by releasing a really well done comic strip explaining their reasoning, prior to today’s launch.
In short they are saying that the UI is much improved, each tab is its own process (so if one crashes the whole things doesn’t close), Javascript can be multi threaded (no more wating for a process to finish before another one starts) and multiple security & privacy improvements.
First impressions after the speedy install and it automatically importing my Firefox bookmarks (particularly the toolbar & without adding extra rubbish) are good.
Immediate likes:
- Speedy rendering (though to be fair Safari is also based on WebKit)
- Folder like tab that one can drag out into a new window (with page preview)
- The magic auto complete address/search bar seems pretty clever and I’m also liking the colour coding in the addresses
- Text areas in web pages are stretchy
- Javascript debugger and HTML/CSS inspector
- There’s a task manager showing what each tab is doing/using
- Gmail hasn’t crashed yet
I’m not so keen on:
- No taskbar, though I see that mousing over links brings up a small tooltip at the bottom of the screen
- Find is Ctrl-F and I so love the ‘/’ of Firefox matching Vim’s control
- Really missing right-click and left for back (using mouse gestures)
- No web developer toolbar (another FF extension) or ability to see at a glance if a page validates though to be fair it’s very early days
- Really surprised to see that zoom has taken a step backwards and doesn’t zoom images.
So in reality my only dislikes are that I’m missing some Firefox add-on features which for a browser only released in the past few hours isn’t too shoddy at all especially as I could ‘make do’ with the in-built debugging support.
I’ve set it as my default browser and we’ll see how I get on for a extended period, first signs are promising, though.
