Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Google Chrome Browser: First Impressions

Just installed the beta of Google Chrome on Vista this morning. Generally, it's pretty slick! Installation was painless, only took a couple of minutes to download. Rendering is first-rate (no surprise- they're leveraging WebKit). I tried our site - all the basic smoke tests seemed to work fine. The JS engine didn't seem terribly snappy- though with all the JIT stuff they're doing, I'm sure they've got plenty of work left for cold startup perf.

The "Incognito Mode" is pretty nifty (non-persistent browsing sessions)- wonder who stole what between Chrome and IE8's InPrivate mode.

Really like the integrated JS console and debugging stuff- hopefully that stays in the finished product rather than being a separate download/install. Having customers with Firebug on their machines is invaluable for debugging weird one-off issues- it'd be even better if something similar was built in!

My coworker was able to crash it on YouTube, and was also able to get the "Sad Tab" (it says "Aw Snap!"- sweet). The process isolation stuff is fantastic- kinda back to the way IE3 used to do frames in their own processes... Funny how we always end up repeating ourselves, for better or for worse.

UI looks very similar to IE7 in most respects (layout, etc), except for the position of the tab bar where each tab has its own address bar. Very comfy and familiar. Looks pretty on Vista.

Anyway, a very polished first beta from first impressions- kudos to the Chrome team! My interest is piqued- I'll be watching carefully and will continue to play with it.

2 comments:

Danny said...

I tried it out today on Vista as well, and I like it so far. It really is clean and launches really quickly. I just hope they get the extensions to where firefox is so I can have greasemonkey, del.icio.us, etc. extensions.

Oh, Susie and I are visiting on the 17th and would like to come see your new house if you are available. I'll call you when it gets closer. We are going to AZ/NM first for a week.
Take care.
-Danny

Josh Bancroft said...

Heh. Neither Chrome nor IE8 stole Incognito/InPrivate mode from each other. They both stole it from Safari, which has had "Private Browsing" mode (a.k.a. "porn mode") for years. :-)