Ok, so unless you live on a different planet you have already heard that Google has released their own web browser called Chrome. After all the news stories I heard on the radio (even on BBC World Service), I decided that instead of going to bed like any normal person, I stay up till this stupid hour and try the new browser. As if staying up was not a sacrifice big enough, I also had to boot my computer in Windows Vista, as there is no Linux version yet.
The installation of the program is very easy. You need to go to Google Chrome page and download a small installer (about 400k). After that, the setup program downloads the files necessary for installation, but unfortunately it does not give you any indication how big are these files. Anyhow, they cannot be too big because the whole process took less than one minute (but some transparency would be nice).
After playing with the browser for about one hour, I have to admit that I am impressed. The browser is presented as Beta, but all my attempts to make it crash failed. I visited a wide range of pages: many normal HTML pages with little Javascript, as well as big fat Web 2.0 monsters (e.g. last.fm). Everything run very smoothly. Even one of my webpages, which uses Javascript and for some unknown reason has an error in Internet Explorer (but not in any other browser), is displayed without any problem.
One of the features of the browser is supposed to be its speed … and trust me it is fast. I tried pages with lots of photos and they were rendered at the speed of light. Scrolled through my 200+ emails in my Yahoo mail inbox without the usual delay I notice in Firefox.
If I want to be picky, I can find things which would be nice to be improved. Chrome passes the Acid1 and Acid2 tests without a problem, but achieves only 77 out of 100 points in the Acid3 test, which in the end is not bad at all. For comparison the browsers I have installed on my computer obtain:
- IE8: 18 out 100 and what it displays is a mess,
- Firefox 2.0: 53 out 100 and the result is nowhere near what it is supposed to be,
- Safari 3.1.2 74 out of 100 with an ok result, and
- Opera 9.52: 83 out of 100 with a result very close to what it is supposed to be.
Just for fun the images are below.
Currently Java applets do not seem to run in Chrome. When I played a Flash movie the image was a bit bad at the beginning, but it become ok after a while (it may be that Vista decided to use all the processor to do one of its unknown things for a few seconds). Finally, the most annoying thing is that there is no status bar, so when you hover over a link a bit of the page gets covered, but I suppose we will get used to it in a while and find the status bar annoying.
Probably, I should mention that the start page with the most visited pages looks nice, but it is nothing new. The address bar functions like a search engine, but we are already used to something like this from Firefox 3.0. For the moment there are no extensions (and more important for me right now, no spellchekers), but I am sure they will appear soon. The current version of Chome seems to be mainly for developers and it includes very good support for debugging and examining the contents of a page. I wonder whether the Inspect element will make it to the final release.
So all in all, I can say that Google Chrome is a very nice browser, but for the moment all I can do is sit and wait for the Linux version, because I am not going to spend more time in Vista … and while I sit and wait I will wonder whether Chrome is a step forward or is just another browser on which our pages will have to be tested and for which we will have snippets of code written specially to avoid its bugs.
September 10th, 2008 3:07 pm
I was wondering whether you had any Firefox add-ons installed when u did the (time) experiments. Also it seems that Chrome is a memory hog (with no add-ons, since not yet available). This might be a problem when one usually runs many hungry applications at the same time. Also why isn’t Firefox3 part of the Acid test? I think it ought perform better than Firefox2.
I like diversity and having options, but being constrained to use it in Windows (XP ;) of course) means that I’ll wait till it becomes a real alternative for Firefox3.
Great review. The Yahoo! Mail performance is what actually captured my attention.
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