To be honest I thought the stage was set. Safari to Windows platform, Firefox 3.0 released, IE 8 to come. A whole ‘new’ cycle of browser wars to see who comes on top. Little did I suspect a ‘late comer’ to the next round in browser slug wars.
But here it is: Chrome.
And by Google no less, a company that in my minds eye is slowly sliding down the same path of controversy as Microsoft once did. Google the active participant in filtering of content when a government tries to keep its people in the dark. Times are near where people become more sceptical about the altruistic facade of that company which is arguably the biggest influence on the modern day web.
But taking a quick look at the browser and setting my scepticism aside for a moment I can only say that I am already very much in love with this browser.At first glance stuff just seems to render fine. The browser makes use of the AppleWebKit and renders pretty much the same as Safari does. This blog renders very similar (if not identical) to FireFox without a single tweak. This is a big advantage, since it means you don’t really have to code and style against yet another platform.
And then: it’s fast. I mean, really REALLY fast, like CRAZY FAST. It just seems to want to go. Internet Explorer, Firefox. I can start those and after a little while I am ready to go. But this browser feels like it opens as fast as notepad. Rendering pages? Again, really fast. Compared to FireFox and Internet Explorer Chrome wins hands down.
The speed with which Chrome seems to operate seems to have to do with the fact that Chrome starts up separate instances of itself with every opened tab. This means that in the core an single chrome application is responsible for a single tab (and thus a single site), which in theory increases overall stability; in the case a site causes a crash of the browser (a simplified depiction) the rest of the tabs in theory would still be working. So no more lost e-mails you send through your webclient, just because the flash plug-in barfed over some bad object.
Small it is not. Compared to FireFox’s approximate 25MB of storage space, Chrome takes up 65MB (pretty much the same as Safari). In the current day and age where storage is cheap however this should not be a major obstacle. One thing which did baffle me was the location where the application gets stored. Normal apps disappear in your Program Files folder. Not Chrome, which is installed into your Documents and Settings (Local SettingsApplication Data to be exact). This has the advantage that you could technically install Chrome on any computer (also considering Chrome does not ‘do’ registry keys). On the other hand it is a rather illogical place to place your program.
The browser has some shortcomings. It seems that the current version of Chrome uses a relatively older AppleWebKit, which makes the CSS3 support less than could be desired. A nitpicker might complain about the fact that Chrome does not (yet) support unicode URLs and I know some Linux- or Apple-fans that might gripe that it has not been released for their platform yet.
However, realizing that Chrome is in a beta stage (0.2) there is still hope for all of these things.
For those interested why Google decided to make their own web browser you will find an explanation here and a funny comic version that goes more into technical detail here. For those interested why Google decided to make their own web browser you will find an explanation here and a funny comic version that goes more into technical detail here.