Tonight, I attended a Google briefing on its hastily-launched web browser, Chrome – which is now available for download here.
At first glance, the browser looked extremely impressive. In fact, it’s the only browser I’ve seen that could seriously tempt me away from my snug-fitting default browser, Firefox. However, I must stress that I was only privy to a Google demonstration of the browser before tonight’s 8pm launch, and haven’t actually played with it hands-on myself. For that, you’ll have to wait for PC Pro’s full preview tomorrow.
Here, however, are my early thoughts on what I saw:
Interface
The design of the browser is astonishingly clean. Maximum space is afforded to the web page itself, with ancillary clutter such as toolbars and browser buttons kept to a sparse minimum.
Tabs are handled with real aplomb. Click to open a new tab, and instead of being presented with a blank page, you’re met with a grid of thumbnails of the nine sites you visit most often, as well as a selection of links to bookmarks, recently closed tabs and recent searches.
If you choose to open a selection of those sites simultaneously, in different tabs, you can read each page and simply click on the close tab button, and then swiftly move to the next. The tab bar doesn’t resize until you move the cursor down the page, which is a small, but devilishly clever little touch.
One especially nice touch is the way in which you can drag a tab out of the tab bar to create a separate window – to keep your Gmail screen running distinctly from the rest of your browser tabs, for example. When you’re finished with it, you can simply pop it back in.
Navigation and search
Surprisingly considering Google’s core business, there’s no dedicated search box in the browser. Instead Google combines the address bar (where you type URLs) and the search bar into one, dubbed the Omnibox.
Chrome attempts to auto complete URLs or search terms as you begin typing them into the box. Type London, for example, and London weather might appear as one of the suggested searches, which has the potential to become annoying, but didn’t appear to be too obtrusive in our demonstration.
One novel idea is searching websites straight from the Omnibox. So, for example, you can type Amazon to bring up your previously visited Amazon.co.uk URL, hit the Tab button, and then search for a book using Amazon’s search engine, without actually having to visit the site first. Google said this feature should work with “most websites”.
Performance
Google claims the sluggishness of other browsers was what drove it to build its own, and so it’s no surprise that faster performance is one of the key advantages of Chrome. We obviously can’t make any meaningful judgement of the browser’s speed until we test the code for ourselves, but pages rendered during the demonstration with commendable speed, while Google’s slideshow presentation (from Google Docs, naturally) moved with desktop app slickness.
Google ran a JavaScript benchmark to demonstrate the claimed superiority of its newly-designed V8 JavaScript engine compared to its rivals, Firefox 3.01 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. It showed a wheel spinning in IE8 at around three revolutions per minute, in Firefox 3.01 at 10rpm and in Chrome at anywhere between 30 and 47rpm. Obviously, such pre-prepared demos have to be taken with a fistful of condiments, but Google is remarkably confident of its web app performance.
Each tab runs as a separate process, so that if one goes belly up, the rest of the browser remains unaffected. A Task Manager showing the memory and CPU clocks allocated to each tab can be used to identify and shut down rogue sites/apps, which is a powerful feature, giving rise to speculation that what Google has created is more akin to a web “operating system” than a browser. Even specific plug-ins can be disabled.
Privacy and history
As you might expect from Google, searching your browser history is especially efficient. The history is very cleanly presented in a day-by-day breakdown, and Google not only searches the URL but the content of the web pages you visited.
If that sounds a little too Big Brotherish, or you want to do a little (ahem) private surfing, you can switch the browser into Incognito mode and surf without the browser retaining any cookies or history. This was a feature Microsoft trumpeted for IE 8 earlier in the week, and one that looks set to quickly become a fixture in every browser.
Summary
Google claims to have spent two years developing Chrome and from my brief demonstration it looks like time well spent. This looks set to give both Microsoft and Mozilla a great deal to think about, and could indeed by a coup de grace for smaller browsers such as Opera and even Safari. We’ll have a more detailed analysis of Chrome tomorrow.
Tags: browsers, Chrome, firefox, Google, Internet Explorer
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September 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 pm
I agree, the interface is nice and clean, although in use I think I prefer the way FF and IE do the search box enabling you to use any of a list of engines and sites.
Also the use of (or lack of) colour contributes to making the interface seem clean when it isn’t really any better than IE so I think “astonishingly clean” is a bit of an exaggeration.
At least unlike FF it will install the Flash plugin without a restart (which seems so backward in FF), but it didn’t automatically detect it needed it installed which isn’t so impressive.
First impressions are good, but I can’t say as yet, that I’ll be rushing to change to it. Perhaps my natural distrust of Google doesn’t help! Ho hum.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:30 pm
You don’t need to restart firefox to install a plugin. After installation, load about:plugins and then continue browsing. (Why they don’t register plugins by default? I dunno.)
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I’ve had a quick play with Chrome and it seems pretty responsive, although the first website that I tried, http://www.pcpro.co.uk, took over two minutes to load. No problems with PC Pro, or any other site, after that initial delay though.
And just in case you’re wondering if it was a network problem, I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t. I loaded Firefox 3.0.1 whilst waiting for Chrome to load the PC Pro site and that managed to load the 12 websites I had open in tabs, including the PC Pro website, all before Chrome had managed to do its thing. it would be interesting to know if anyone else experiences anything similar.
I’ve also found one problem that will stop me using Chrome as my main browser for the time being and that’s its inability to maintain a website’s layout when scaling pages. If you use Firefox 3.0.1 or IE 8 Beta 2 then resizing the text causes the page elements to resize accordingly to fit the new text size. Chrome, however, just resizes the text which means that the newly resized text will run behind graphics and other text or, if you increase it enough, will almost disappear completely from fixed size elements. To see this action just try it on http://www.pcpro.co.uk or http://www.amazon.co.uk.
So, old-style browser behaviour from the new kid on the block, means that Chrome is close but gets no cigar from me at the moment.
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
seems interesting this new browser, gonna download it and give it a go!
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 am
Funnily enough I tried PC Pro’s web-site as one of my first site’s in Chrome and it loaded pretty speedily. I’m not sure about having the bookmarks on the right-hand side of the screen - I’ve got so used to it being on the left in Firefox.
Also, I’ll have to use it more before I can work out whether giving each tab its own thread is a good thing or not i.e. it prevents browser crashes.
Overall though, I’m liking it more then Safari. Chrome will probably become my third choice browser after Firefox and I.E. simply because at the moment it seems a bit lightweight, but that can also work in its favour (it’s yet to become bloated like I.E.).
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:49 am
So Google releases a browser, but why is it only for Windows? After years of offering support for Linux software development, why then do Google just develop a flagship product for Windows?
I hope they do a Linux version very soon, otherwise I might not bother with it.
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 am
It is fast, clever and very clean looking.
Unfortunately it is too clean looking for my tastes. I keep wondering where everything has gone on my toolbar.
As it has yet to develop a series of add ons I will be sticking to FF for the moment but will return occasionally to see how it is doing.
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:48 am
Wouldn’t worry about the linux version as i’m sure it will be integrated into the new google OS. bye bye windows hello goonux
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
Ehm! When it look nice, and I have discovered two thing that I am not happy with it.
1) It use the proxy from IE engine, so if I change that then it change the proxy of the IE as well. No way Jose! (The same is said for Opera/Safari) Firefox is independent from such action.
2) There is NO option to clear the cookies or the Private data like the Firefox will do when it been closed.
So lovely and no thanks!
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
I don’t like this in their terms and conditions:
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”
So - uninstalled, and staying that way - unless the clause goes.
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:09 pm
hang on quote “you’re met with a grid of thumbnails of the nine sites you visit most often,”from top of page!
This is exactly what you can do in opera’s browser
what are google up to seriously!
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Interesting, every 5 mins of so, even without the browser running, a certain GOOGLEUPDATE.EXE is trying to access the net. Why? Why can’t it do this only when I launch the browser? They go on about the browser being lightweight and quick etc… but I don’t want unnecessary processes running like this!
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:34 pm
INCOGNITO MODE is not what it seems. Although no site history is retained on your computer in this mode, Google still records every search you make and your IP address with it.
September 4th, 2008 at 7:17 am
It’s got a lot going for it, the interface, I like the “recently” used sites thumbnail page and the layout, but…
It’s flawed, seriously flawed, imho.. If you enter in an address/name within FF 3.0 you get to the list with one keypress and enter, with Chrome it’s two, one to go past the search facility. That’s bad design, one press good, two presses bad.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:18 am
read the EULA 11.1
this browser will NOT see my computer anytime soon
September 4th, 2008 at 9:22 am
The offending clause has now been modified:
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Usually, when a browser is reviewed its security and privacy functionality is scrutinised in detail. Yet not a single reviewer seems to have considered this, they seem so besotted with Google’s latest offering. I like the look and feel of it, but it seems to be nothing but a vehicle to allow Google to acquire data. No cookie management, all your browsing history is passed directly to Google (isn’t that the same as Phorm?), with no way of seeming to be able to control that.
Initially I was well impressed. now I’m less so. IF it does become the number one browser on the market then Google will be a whole lot richer and we will have happily handed over all that personal information we’ve been trying to protect for so long.
I’m no conspiracy theorist (says he creating one), but the bottom line is that the real reason Google created this browser was to have a more effective way of extracting the data that is the core of their business and I’m amazed that the reviewers seem to blinded to have noticed. So much for reviewers!
September 5th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
I tried, was slightly impressed, then sad it didn’t support Google bookmarks. I uninstalled.
September 5th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Google Chrome is really fast!
Now I can sort 200,000 records inside of Browser (Chrome) just in 1 sec. (Faster than Microsoft Excel):
http://www.ardentedge.com/ex_if.htm
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Incognito mode meaning the old “Private Browsing” feature of Safari?