I’ve been playing with Google’s brand new browser, Chrome, over the past 24 hours and it’s already my favorite browser. I love it. It’s everything a browser should be, and nothing that it should not be.
Why Chrome?
First, let me guess as to WHY Google released a browser.
If you go through Google’s explanatory comic strip about Chrome,
you get the sense that they’re doing it just to help the Web be a
better place. I’m usually cynical about these kinds of claims, but I
think that in this case they’re completely justified in making that
claim.
To paraphrase Google, existing browsers aren’t built to run
applications. They’re built to display Web pages. They’re simply not
industrial-strength, and can easily be crashed and become bloated. If
one site you’re browsing pukes, the others are forced to die along with
it. There goes all your work. Web applications as a whole suffer
because of the limitations of the browser. It’s cliche, but the browser
was the weakest link. The main thrust behind Chrome is to offer a
browser which can run rich Web applications in a STABLE manner.
Smashing through the dead ends
Again, though, WHY does Google care about this? I’ve seen all sorts
of ideas from Google taking aim at Microsoft to Google wanting to be
able to track you better. I think the reason is much simpler than that.
Because of the limitations of IE and FireFox, developers have been
moving to third party "Web" platforms like Adobe Air and Microsoft
Silverlight. These applications are a dead end for the Web. By
that I mean that if you go to www.acoolapp.com and it’s an Adobe Air
application, the Web stops there. Google can’t search inside of it. You
can’t do any deep linking into that application. And, most importantly,
Google can’t crawl the content. Think about that. These rich
application platforms have the potential to kill Google’s search
business. As a result, if they really took off, instead of being able
to find relevant content all you’d get are individual sites, and you’d
have to search within those to find what you’re looking for. The Web as
we know and love it would be gone.
Obviously Google has a vested interest in making sure that doesn’t
happen, but I think the rest of us do as well. If the Web becomes much
more shallow, with content locked up in proprietary applications, we
all lose. The reason the Web is so powerful is because of its open
nature which allows freely linking between content and data, and if
that disappears so does much of the Web’s value along with it. Chrome
gives rich applications running Javascript and open standards a stable
browser to run in so that they can compete with Air and Silverlight
apps. I applaud this effort. This is one instance in which Google’s and
every Internet citizen’s interests align perfectly. Here’s to Air and
Silverlight being flashes in the pan.
(I will note, however, that Chrome probably does indeed kill
Microsoft and Adobe’s proprietary platforms dead. They are now
redundant. I don’t think that this was the primary driver, however, so
much as the fact that they lock up all the content that Google wants to
crawl. This is simply a case of the proprietary nature of the platforms
being bad for the Web, and receiving their just desserts.)
Speed
This browser screams. It just does. Every site I go to seems faster,
especially Google sites (although that’s not surprising I suppose).
They’ve done excellent work implementing a blazing fast Javascript
engine, and I don’t doubt that application developers are going to push
their customers towards Chrome very quickly. The user experience is
just better when the user is running Chrome.
As Steve Ballmer once said: "Developers, developers, developers".
Google just made nice with all the Web developers out there. They will
be rewarded.
Stability
I do a ton of my work on the Web, and FireFox often slows to a crawl or
just act stupidly, like refusing to let me type in text boxes or click
buttons. Chrome, at least to this point, does not have these problems.
This is huge. It has alleviated much of the underlying worry I had
about whether the work I was doing would be blown away because of a
browser crash. I used to copy & paste large text chunks into
Notepad to ensure that I wouldn’t lose them, but the need to do that
seems to have gone away with Chrome. This saves me time and money.
Google has done incredible work in making sure that each site runs
in its own process and can’t step on another or suck up memory. This
thing is ROCK solid, and I love it. It’s what Web 2.0 has needed for a
LONG time.
User Interface
I love the user interface. They’ve managed to strip away everything you
don’t normally need for browsing, or hide it until you do need it. This
leaves so much more screen real estate available for the page you’re
browsing. They’ve also done a great job with the aesthetics, the icons
are small and visually uninteresting enough so that you don’t notice
them until you’re looking for them. Minimalism for the win!
Flair
I don’t know what else to call this, but these are all
of the little visual cues that Chrome gives you to tell you it’s doing
things. Google has out-Appled Apple, Chrome absolutely shines here. For
example, there is no status bar by default, except when you would
normally look at it (like when a page is loading). When you hover over
a link, an unobtrusive status bar pops up to show you the URL. When you
download a file, it actually shows an icon floating down over the
screen to show that you have indeed downloaded the file (FireFox would
sometimes leave you wondering if you hadn’t downloaded it
successfully). It gives you indicators in all the right places, and it
makes FireFox and IE look like ugly, awkward, bumbling, has-beens.
Open Source
Best of all, this is an open source project. For
all of those who think that this is an effort by Google to track people
more closely, all you need to do is go check the source to see. Don’t
like something, go change it.
The Bad
The ONLY bad thing I’ve run into while using Chrome so
far is that some sites check which browser you’re using to enable
things like AJAX and rich interfaces, and they don’t recognize Chrome
yet. They assume that you’re using IE 5 or something, and they stick
you with a completely un-dynamic interface that sucks. TypePad is doing
this to me right now. Hopefully this is a short-lived phenomenon, it’s
surely something that’s easily fixed.
Overall: 10/10
In case you can’t tell, I love this browser. I
didn’t think a browser could excite me anymore, but this one has. The
speed and stability would probably be enough to win me over by
themselves, but the user interface improvements they’ve made are the
sweet and sexy icing on the cake. And I think the reason they’re
putting this out on the Web is a good one that I agree with, albeit one
that WILL end up driving a stake through the heart of Microsoft and
Adobe. Go Google!
