Google Chrome

Continuing my series of biased reviews of Windows-only products…

Google Chrome is a free, open-source web browser from Google that currently only runs on Windows.

One of Chrome’s core aims was to be the fastest browser. There have been a lot of benchmarks to show cases in which this is and isn’t the case, but I’m just looking at anecdotal usage for now. Using gmail in Chrome feels faster than using it in Firefox 3 and significantly faster than IE7. I didn’t compare it to Firefox 3.1, which will have some significant speed improvements.

Another significant feature is process isolation: if one page crashes the browser, you only lose that tab, and if one page is using a lot of CPU or memory, you can figure out which one it is. I didn’t have any crashes or memory/CPU problems in the time I’ve used Chrome, so I haven’t actually used these features, but I’m glad to know that they’re there. There are plenty of times on linux and mac that I’d like to know which page is using the CPU, but I don’t know of a way besides guessing which tabs to close.

Chrome currently doesn’t support extensions, but I found that most of the firefox extensions I use are already built-in. Resizable textareas is built-in, with each textarea (e.g. a comment box on a blog) having a little handle for resizing. I use greasemonkey scripts from time to time, and greasemonkey isn’t built in yet, but you can enable it in some builds, with some caveats. Finally, I use firebug all the time when developing web pages. Chrome’s javascript console reproduces almost all the functionality of firebug that I use. I still prefer firebug, but the javascript console does work quite well. Plus, it doesn’t seem to have some of the performance implications that firebug does.

Chrome’s address bar, the Omni Bar, is a combination search box and address bar. Most other browsers separate these, but Chrome tries to intelligently figure out what you’re trying to do. I haven’t found this to be as good as Firefox’s awesome bar. For example, I’m currently writing this from http://www.magicspatula.com/blog/wp-admin/post-new.php. To navigate to this page, I just type “post-new” into the address bar in firefox. It has an index of the URL parts, so the correct page comes up in the list right away. Chrome doesn’t quite get the right order for me:

Despite starring the page and following that path many times, it’s still not the top result. I use shortcuts like this all the time, so this slows me down a bit. To be fair, though, most of my other uses of the keyboard do work just fine.. this is a bit of an outlier.

I’ve been a big Firefox fan for a long time. I used it when it was called Firebird and when it was called Phoenix before that. If I were using Windows regularly, I’m not sure which browser I would use. Probably both. I’m also not sure if I’m more excited about Firefox 3.1 or Chrome coming to mac and linux. Luckily it doesn’t matter, because all those things will be happening anyway. Better to have too many good choices than too few.

Chrome accounted for about 5% of this blog’s traffic in the last month.

If you’re on a mac and want to keep tabs on Chrome’s status, see this status page.

I left out a bunch of features in this post, so you may want to view some short videos about them or just try Chrome yourself.