Yes, from the guy who rarely ever posts anything in his blog.
Google Chrome beta was released today. This is the day after Google accidentally published a “comic book” outlining how it works, and decided to just let it go ahead and let the beta get released. I, being an enthusiastic Google supporter, anxiously downloaded it and fired it up.
For a beta product, I’m actually quite pleased with it. It has problems here and there, but overall, I think they captured the spirit of the modern web browser while removing (or tucking away) most of the bloat that most users don’t use. Heck, some people don’t even know what it does.
On the Plus Side
Using the WebKit rendering engine, Chrome renders pages fairly well. I’m probably alone in this, but the Safari browser (which also uses WebKit) just looks plain horrible to look at, not meshing in with windows at all. (Brushed metal, I feel, is way overrated and overused.) Chrome, despite having a more metallic name, greets me with a soothing set of soft blues and whites while clearly dilineating the different functional areas. If I recall correctly, studies shown that blue is a good color to use, as it helps keep a user more alert and attentive. (Green, on the other hand, was considered the most soothing of the colors.) Too, Chrome features a rather large default viewing space for webpages, having only three rows right now: tabs, address bar/controls, and bookmarks. Everything I need.
You’ve got the web domain highlighting that Internet Explorer 8 Beta has (which I’m also having fun testing). A nice touch, even if it really doesn’t matter to me as I’m smart enough to read the whole URL. On the other hand, if people are like me (bahahahahaha), they tend to put bookmarks on a toolbar, as it’s a daunting task to go through a whole list of bookmarks from a menu, most of which you’ve forgotten about. So, Chrome automatically places bookmarks (CTRL+D) on the bar. Simple, but rather useful (and less likely for people to forget).
Tab support is something I dreamed about back when I first used Firefox 1 (I started using it during the period it was called Firebird). Like most browsers now, you can rearrange tabs by dragging them. Thankfully, Chrome animates this, so its easier and more intuitive on my eyes. The thing that takes the cake, though is being able to grab a tab and pretty much rip it out of the tab bar. This will actually create a new window for just that tab (which is probably pretty easy given the architecture of the browser). I find this incredibly useful when I have to look at two different webpages at the same time, but don’t want to go hotkey crazy to get the same effect relatively fast. (ALT+D, CTRL+C, CTRL+F4, CTRL+N, ALT+D, CTRL+V, ENTER). Plus, you can easily snap it back into the tab bar by just dragging it back. God, thank you for object-oriented methodologies.
Speaking of snapping, the browser itself is pretty snappy. I wouldn’t call it a speed demon, but it loads up simple webpages pretty darn fast. It’s better than some versions of other browsers that I remember.
IE8’s been getting me to use the address bar more as the so-called “omnibar,” which incorporates search into it. I remember using this sort of thing a long time ago, and I wasn’t too impressed when it kept searching for things I didn’t want to search for, or looking for a website when I wanted a search term. IE8 renewed my faith in the system, and Chrome surprised me by doing the same. It works well, and is arguably a little quicker/snappier at it than IE. Which is good, because there’s no search bar in Chrome, freeing up more space.
I’ve used the word “snappy” to describe Chrome a lot. I saw some people on slashdot saying the same thing. Is it just me, or is “snappy” the one word that best describes reactions to Chrome?
For the more tech-savvy people, Chrome comes with its own freakin’ Task Manager. Its nice to know where that memory is going to. Especially when you want to pinpoint that one tab that’s basically screwing your computer over with some ill-prepared Flash advertisement that cycled through. It also includes “Stats for nerds,” a more detailed memory comparison that even goes so far as to show how Chrome stacks up against other browsers that are open. Really nice.
On the Other Hand
Chrome is nice. However, it is a beta product of a 1.0 version. There are still things that it lacks in, and some quirks and bugs that need to be worked out.
The much-touted V8 JavaScript engine that Chrome uses has some bugs that breaks a few pages I use. I work with a few PBwikis for various projects, and the JavaScript-heavy PBwiki 2.0 seems to break on it. At least, when trying to edit a page, which is one of its essential functions. According to the rather prompt and excellent customer support, the fault probably lies with V8, though they’re still looking into it. I’m inclined to agree as Safari (which also uses the WebKit renderer) had the same problem but was fixed months ago.
Too, as a budding web developer, I took some painstakingly difficult times to make some JavaScript that was really bad (AJAX with innerHTML) into a best practice (AJAX with DOM manipulation). IE8 ran the code fine under its Standards Mode, as did Opera and Firefox 3, but Chrome meant with only partial success, rendering it fine initially but unable to update the page via JavaScript to reflect choices the user made. I’ll probably try to debug some more, but with three out of four browsers working fine, and WebKit proving to be generally reliable, I’m probably going to say V8 is to blame.
I started using OpenID a while ago for easy PBwiki access, and using certificates was a great way to do things; no passwords! Chrome seemed to import my certificates correctly, but myOpenID couldn’t seem to find them. Meh, rather annoying.
It reminds me of a Dark Heresy RP I was playing where some door refused to budge for some acolyte. As well as our friendly Tech-Priest buddy, who ended up activating the security system and nearly getting us all killed.
All in All
All in all, Chrome is a very nice start to a browser from Google. For trivial things, it seems to work pretty well. Heck, I’m even writing this post from Chrome. Unfortunately, it interferes with some of my daily activities, which is basically signing into OpenID and using PBwiki. Hopefully, this matter will be resolved, as I see a lot of promise in this browser.
Regarding AX day summaries, does anyone really care? I have a few of them written in Notepad, but…
Update: According to my research and analyzing my code, it looks like V8 handles event listeners slightly differently. Some of my code involves setting the onchange attribute to a particular value, and using that value as an argument for a new function when using addEventListener(). While other browsers will replace this element, V8 won’t allow it, and onchange will remain null, further making addEventListener() useless. So, meh. Well, at least that’s ONE quirk out of the way…
