Google Chrome – First Impressions

Google released this week the first version of their browser, called Chrome, and I decided to give it a quick look. I’ve played with Firefox (even v3) and Safari (after Apple aggressively pushed it to my computer) but always came back to Internet Explorer, so I wanted to see if there is anything here that would make me abandon the Microsoft browser and I must say that from a first impression, there are a lot of good things about this new browser that could actually make me dump Internet explorer. Here is what I observed so far:

• Chrome is blazing fast! Pages just load extremely quickly and efficiently. Google focused on creating a browser that is made for Web applications and not just static pages so JavaScript processing is extremely fast. They created a benchmark page that will allow you to test the different browsers you have for speed and see the results yourself. The results are pretty impressive:

• The browser design is extremely minimalist and only shows you what you need to give you the maximum space for the web page / application you are using. At first it might seem like some important things are missing that you can really live without for example:
  • The Home page button – This is something that you got used to from the first version of the browser but seems to be missing here. When you open a new tab you are taken to the Chrome home page (this can be changed in the options) which shows you the most visited sites, quick search box and recent bookmarks.
  • The bookmarks – This was the thing that I missed most. I’m used to work with the bookmarks tab open all the time in IE. By default the bookmarks (which are imported from your other browser) are “gone”. You can access them only when you are looking at the “New Tab” or change this setting and enable quick access to the bookmarks bar in every tab.
• The address bar is dynamic and shows you very efficiently suggestions as you type. It will suggest sites you visited before, that you have in your bookmarks or even allow you to search directly from the address bar in Google (or other default search engine)
• Speaking of searching, Chrome seems to take over the search capabilities in other sites, so after visiting Amazon and searching for a book, next time you want to search for a book in Amazon you can do it directly in your address bar instead of going to Amazon and then searching for the book. Pretty cool

• Google decided to isolate each web site / application you are using, so if one gets stuck it doesn’t kill the others. Each tab has its own process space so they don’t share the same memory address and threads (also helps the security and isolation of harmful sites). You can even access the different browsers you have open from their own task manager (Shift+Esc):

• And even access more information about the different tabs:

• The browser has a great built-in source viewer that actually looks like an HTML source viewer instead of opening the source in notepad:

• Another great developer tool is the JavaScript console. It is a great tool that gives you a clear navigation in the page source (it also marks in the page itself what part it is) and see errors, warnings etc.

• Searching for a text within a page also is implemented very nicely. Instead of popping another dialog and clicking for next result, the search is built into the page showing you the number of matches as you type them and also highlighting the text in the page. As you type the text, the browser also focuses automatically on the area of the page where the first (or only) result shows up:

• The popup blocker works great! Instead of just blocking the popup window, they are confined to the tab they came from and appear as a minimized window in the bottom right, so you can still look at them if you want (just like dragging an application window). Once the tab they are part of is closed or you browse to a different site, they will disappear as well.

This is a very quick and clean browser that is worth checking out! You can go through the comics book that was created by Google to explain about the features of Chrome and what went into building the application.