Google Chrome: Good.

September 5th, 2008

Everyone knows by now that Google’s finally thrown its own offering, Chrome, into the Great Second Browser Wars. It’s been called “soft, yet elegant” and a “smart, innovative browser” and everyone everywhere is crowing about everything from its simplicity to its speed. Sure, there was a little craziness about Chrome’s EULA, but that’s been taken care of. If you’re reading this, though, chances are you just want my take on the browser. Well, here it is! As a nod to Chrome’s absolutely-no-nonsense, no-frills approach to the browser’s interface, I’m going to restrain my usual logorrhea and deliver a nice, calm, minimalist review.

The GUI is incredibly sparse, but (like all Google products) quite intuitive: tabs, back and forth buttons, a stop/reload button, a bookmark star next to the URL/search bar, and two control buttons (one for page-related activities like opening new tabs and printing, and one for browser preferences). No menus. No titles. That’s it. It’s the browser equivalent of a Mondrian painting.

Whenever you open a new tab, the default home page shows you nine of your most frequented sites (somewhat like Opera’s Speed Dial) plus a list of recent searches. Also, new tabs display your bookmark bar, which you can also select to have shown at all times. When you mouse over a link, its URL appears in a little pop-up line in the lower lefthand corner of the window. And, of course, it’s got your usual pop-up blockers, cache clearers, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just handy.

When you download a file, its download progress pops up at the bottom of the tab. Chrome’s downloads manager opens up a new tab in which all recently downloads are listed by date. Cool.

I particularly like the “Omnibar” that combines Google search with the traditional URL bar so you can easily search Google and your own browsing history at once. Again, nothing earthshaking here, just neat.

Now here’s the really impressive shit.

Google Chrome is very fast. Pages render with lightning speed and JavaScript executes smoothly and quickly. The WebKit HTML engine and v8 JavaScript engine are top-notch. But big deal, right? Firefox renders pages quickly, too, as does IE8 and Opera—and the new JavaScript framework Mozilla has been working on for Firefox will be just as good, if not better, than v8. But what makes Google Chrome so neat is this: each tab, each JavaScript process, is run in its own processor thread.

What’s that mean to non-geeks? Simple: if a JavaScript or plugin glitch makes a tab’s processes choke, only the tab closes, not the whole browser. Now, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 implements this as well, and I’m sure Mozilla will be doing the same shortly too—but neither IE8 nor Firefox 3 have built-in process managers that let you track individual tabs and individual JavaScript engines’ memory usage and stability. Yes. Chrome has its own Windows-style Task Manager.

Don’t think that’s cool or useful? Try opening it up the next time Chrome seems to be acting really slow or some page doesn’t want to reload. You’ll be able to recognize the problem and axe it without causing any of your other Chrome tabs or windows so much as a shiver.

So, yeah….Google Chrome is good. Damn good, in fact.

But it’s not great. Not yet, that is.

The version of Chrome available right now is prettymuch just a proof-of-concept beta. An initial offering to publicly test some new concepts and technologies. It works great—hasn’t crashed on me yet, and I’ve been running it for two days, loading it up with tons of tabs containing everything from Flash games to extremely Ajax-heavy webapps.

But it’s limited. It presently offers no extensibility aside from support for common plugins like Flash and Shockwave, but Google has announced that the browser will support extensions like Firefox soon. In fact, I’m betting it will probably support any and all Firefox extensions, or at least Google will release an API to make it easy to port FF extensions to Chrome.

And they’d better not prevent developers from offering ad-blocking extensions. Or that will kill their browser before it even has a chance to grow. Google text ads are fine by me, but if I can’t click an annoying Flash ad and say, “Go the hell away,” I’m jumping ship without a second thought.

The tab bar definitely needs work, too. Whereas FF3 will allow tabs that do not fit all on one screen to scroll, Chrome merely makes tabs smaller and smaller as it tries to squeeze more and more into the row. Eventually, they turn into nothing more than tiny white peaks with little X’s in their corners. Hint: copy Firefox’s scrolling capability.

A little more polish, a little more user-end functionality would be nice, too, but I know that will be coming soon enough.

Nonetheless, for being an early technical beta, Chrome is quite polished. It works great. It’s stable as can be. I’ve been using it almost exclusively for three days now. I really like it.

In a few months, once more functionality—and, even more importantly, more support for functionality—gets added…I’ll probably love it.

I haven’t been this excited about a stupid browser since I first discovered Firefox’s 0.1 beta years ago. Chrome manages to capture the minimal aesthetic of that ancient Firefox progenitor and add an HTML/v8 framework to it that makes it perfectly suited for today’s interactive Web.

In fact, I would recommend this beta—this right-out-the-door, slapped-together first-run beta—to any web user, novice to expert, who wants a faster, more stable browsing experience. Yes, it’s that good already.

So yeah. Way to go, Google guys! But you’ve still got stuff to work on. Quite fuckin’ around with Picasa and get down on it.

[Errata: Is it just me, or does the Chrome “ball” logo look like a Pokemon sphere? “I choose you WebKit!” *Peewwww-p-p-peww-pewwwwww!*]

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