Google Chrome

The big news last week in the world of t’Internet was Google’s launch of the Chrome browser. I thought I would take it for a test spin…

First thing to note is that if it wasn’t launched by Google, no-one would be paying any attention to it. There are already good browsers out there built around Mozilla technology namely Firefox and Flock. But, the fact is that because it is made by Google it has to be taken seriously.

(Returning angrily from the Google Chrome homepage) Secondly, they have launched Beta testing with only a Windows version. No version for Mac or Linux. To me, this is like a kick in the teeth to the webdesign community. OK, I’m off to find a Windows computer to try this on… (saves draft and angrily storms off)

(half an hour later) OK, well now I’ve managed to download the beast. Actually straight from the download you can see probably the most interesting aspect of Chrome to me. It’s small.

When Firefox first launched as a serious competitor to IE, it was almost like getting a new computer. Everything on the web was suddenly so fast and stable compared to the bad old days of IE 5 and 6. Unfortunately, as Firefox got up to it’s current v3, more and more features were starting to slow it down and it was taking more and more memory. Fox was getting fat.

Chrome feels leaner and meaner and that’s a good thing. It starts in the blink of an eye and tabbed browsing works a charm.

The second reason to consider Chrome is a very nice feature that basically takes each tab as almost a seperate browser. If you are running an application in one tab and it crashes, with Chrome only that tab is effected (it becomes a “sad tab”). With the other browsers, the whole browser would hang.

Crashing applications in tabs which then crashes the whole browser probably happens to me 4 or 5 times a day, so this feature is great for me.

Pic from the Google Chrome site.

Apart from the speed improvements and the sad tabs, the other features don’t interest me too much at the moment. It has a new homepage layout which shows your recent activity, but I don’t really like this. Especially if you are sharing computers in a household.

In my mind the Pros are:

• It’s fast. It’s faster than Firefox and on a different planet to that other “browser”.

• It’s open source. If Chrome takes off there will be the same great plugins that you already get for Firefox.

• You can do something stupid in one tab and the other tabs carry on as normal.

And now for the cons and why when I first heard about Chrome I was disappointed:

The choice of rendering engine. Chrome uses Webkit, Firefox uses Gecko and IE uses, eh, I don’t know, Thomas the tank engine or something. Whatever it is, it’s useless.
The point is that if these three browsers end up taking a third of the market each, there will be 3 different ways in which each page will be rendered. This means more testing and work for the web designer and more chance that you are going to get lots of websites that look good under on one computer and monitor resolution, but look terrible on another. Browsershots is going to be a very busy website.

My real fear however is that this is only going to hurt Firefox, not IE.
IE is now only the  browser of choice for big organisations who have all their computers shipped with it and the elderly or hard of thinking who don’t know any better. Anyone who actually already knew that changing browser was possible and a good thing has already moved to Firefox, it’s about 22% of the population (38% of the population of readers to this blog, we cater to a knowledgeable crowd 😉 ).

If Chrome takes off, all that will happen is that 78% will use IE, 11% will use Chrome and 11% will use Firefox. The web browsing world will be no further forward, but designers will have to think about 3 rendering engines rather than 2.

Don’t get me wrong, Chrome is good. I didn’t want to like it, but I do. It’s obviously a play by Google to try and get a foothold in the browser market as they know very well that the signs point towards browsers and operating systems mergeing to be the same thing in 10 to 15 years time.
I feel that the sad part is that if this takes off, it will kill Firefox. I’m a big fan of how they have led development on web-browsers for the last 4/5 years. Unfortunately, Chrome looks like it could split the open source browser movement down the middle.