Google Chrome

Posted by Richard Orelup on September 02nd 2008 to AIR, Google

Google Chrome was released today. It’s nice to see the rumor finally become true. I’ve had about an hour of playing with it and this is what I can see.

Plus

  1. Based on Webkit which has a lot of CSS3 features so that gives us a place to play with all those cool new functions. Granted they will only work in this browser it’s still overall cool.
  2. Google Gears by default. I’ve recently come to love the idea of gears to do a lot of cool things with applications in the browser. It fills a different role then AIR which I also have love for but it will be nice to also be able to just tell someone to download chrome and go to an address then to have to have them install a plugin in a browser.
  3. Being able to treat applications like applications. This is where it more directly attacks AIR which is interesting. We will see how well this goes because you have a lot of control with AIR and I’m not sure what all can be done with Chrome. Only time will tell with this one.
  4. Task Menu. I haven’t had to kill anything yet (I have just for fun though) so not sure how well this will work but it will be great if I can kill that rogue tab that’s acting up as opposed to having it lock up and kill my whole browser.

Neutrals
Only one at moment but haven’t seen anything on extensions yet which I’ve been interested in with Firefox and would love to see what can be done with this.

Cons

  1. Bookmarks – Just don’t like how they are done. Couldn’t find a way to organize and so not really sure what this will turn into. Hopefully this gets cleaned up in some way
  2. New JS engine – This could end up being a positive but for now it’s a negative. For the apps I use it hasn’t been any faster then Firefox. If it does become significantly faster that would be great but we will see. I’m hoping it doesn’t have the memory issues Firefox has but I haven’t left it open with a ton of tabs yet. My concern is that it’s another engine we have to worry about when writing code. I’m just not looking forward to having to find the little differences in another engine. But this could turn into a huge positive if all this stuff pans out to be a non-issue.

Well I’ll keep playing with it for a few weeks and we where it goes. Right now it’s not a Firefox killer but we will see. What it will probably do is become my second browser for testing things when I need to be logged into 2 different accounts on the same site for testing. IE was currently filling that role but I’m fine dumping that.

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