Chrome freakin’ rocks. At least that’s my first impression so far.
After a relatively quick download and install from the Chrome Beta site, I was up and running last night with Google’s new browser.
What I was instantly blown away by was how snappy the browser was. From loading the browser in the first place, to opening new tabs, to opening heavy pages on the Internet, Chrome just seems zippy. Forget that…it doesn’t seem zippier, it is. Especially on JavaScript and media heavy sites.
One of the first thoughts I had when I started using the browser was, “Ohh, so this is what Web 2.0 is supposed to be like.” No long waits for bloated websites to sluggishly try and render in IE. Remember back in the day when you first experienced the web over a true high-speed Internet connection? It’s like that again.
My companies website, which I know is very JavaScript heavy, loads much, much faster in Chrome. Gmail seems to open almost instantly. I’m reminded of arriving at the University of Washington and downloading MP3s via Napster–often the download would be done before the % complete bar would even display. That’s the feeling I get surfing with Chrome.
The UI is very minimal. Or at least it feels that way. Perhaps it takes up just as much toolbar space as IE 6 and 7, but it doesn’t feel that way. The integrated address/search/everything bar is pretty slick as well…just start typing what you want. The bar is smart enough to know if you’re searching or looking for a website in your history. Furthermore, Google’s top-search suggestions are displayed when it recognizes you’re typing a search. And the intelligent filtering seems to be a lot smoother than the jarring redraws you see with Firefox 3.
The new tab window seems just…smart. Why wasn’t this done before? When you open a new tab, Google displays thumbnails of your most-frequently (or most-recently? I’m not sure yet…) sites, so with a simple click you can navigate to your favorite locations. If you think about it, you’re really often only going to a handful of sites each day, and now those will be easily accessible.
I haven’t checked, but I assume that Google has provided me a way to access these sites without having to pick up my hands from the keyboard and use the mouse. I need to explore what kind of keyboard shortcuts Chrome offers. The keyboard shortcuts are one of the reasons I find Gmail so easy to use–I am constantly frustrated when Outlook doesn’t understand “g-i” means I want to go back to my Inbox. Bah!
Now, Minyanville ran a story regarding IE 8’s new “porn mode”–aka private browsing or what MS refers to as “InPrivate.” This feature is not new to the browsing world, with Firefox, Safari, and Camino all having had similar features for quite some time. Minyanville, referencing a Financial Times article, insinuated that this would somehow take a hit out of Google’s search engine revenue. Because of course all those people out there in Teh Internets are constantly being mindful of their browsing behavior and the kind of data that Google is collecting–and thusly they’ll always browse “InPrivate”–cutting off some valuable data for Google’s search algorithms.
I dont’ think this really going to be an issue however. Firstly, even if you’re browsing “InPrivate” and you make a search via Google, Google’s obviously going to have your search term, and can still target ads. Furthermore, Google built in an “Incognito” mode into Chrome. And they did some interesting things with it. Their implementation is not all-or-nothing. You can start a new window in “Incognito” mode, or you can right click a link and open the link in a new window that way. The mode is denoted by a rather incognito looking dude in the top of the window and a different colored frame than the default browser. The mode will not keep a history, and will automagically delete all associated browsing data, including cookies, when the tab/window is closed–not just when you restart the browser. So you can surf half your windows privately while keeping the other windows in a normal mode. Buying a surprise gift? Surfing hot trample porn? Sweet! No need to clear your entire browsing history and leave a telltale indication to anyone who is snooping you history.
And to end my first impressions of Chrome, while I have to say the browser feels faster and snappier overall, it does appear to use more memory than Firefox. Google claimed that because of the sandboxing of each window and tab–each run as a separate process, allowing a crashed tab to not bring down the entire browser or OS–there is a larger memory overhead to being with. But as they’ve revamped a lot of the garbage collection in the code, over time the overhead will pay off because other browsers will get bloated and not reallocate unused memory. In initial testing, I opened the same windows in Chrome and Firefox 3, and got about 100MB in memory usage out of Chrome (across all Chrome processes) compared to only about 63MB of usage in Firefox. What I haven’t had a chance to do yet is run both FF and Chrome all day, and find out which is more bloated after a whole day’s usage (I doubt my Windows box will get through the whole day without some other issue or update causing a reboot, so this test might best be left to someone else).
In all, Chrome rocks. Download it, use it, love it. At least for now. And at least until IE 8 comes along and you’re forced to use it to log into some arcane corporate intranet tool. Damn those IE-only sites…
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