Google Chrome Features

Yesterday a new grade A browser was released - Google Chrome. Being a web developer I had to download it. After playing with it for a few minutes I noticed a few things about it both good and bad. Please note that since the browser is only 26 hours old and is still in BETA some of these opinions are slightly biased.

Insane Speed - With the whole gigahertz war in a state of suspended animation and software not taking advantage of multi-core architecture, this is an important factor for both consumers and developers. Chrome loads noticeably faster than ANY other grade A browser out there. It also renders pages extremely fast being that it uses Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. This is a cool thing!

Desktop Based ‘Web Applications’ - WOAH! Wait a second, this is a great idea! In fact its soooo great that it doesn’t even sound like its completely original. That’s right its not. This concept seems to take its conceptual queues from Adobe AIR, but it simplifies the whole equation. I like the idea that I can click on Gmail on my desktop and Gmail opens up and now looks like an actual desktop application instead of a browser window. Very useful feature.

Lack of Plug-ins/Extensions - Okay, I know that I’m being impatient but Google should already know that its going to be competing with Firefox. Why not release Chrome with some plug-ins and whatnot? Being a Web Developer I NEED Firefox’s developer extensions like the Web Developer extension, Firebug, IE Tab and loads of other stuff that cause my version of Firefox to take forever to load. However, this leads me to my next point.

Out-Of-The-Box Developer Tools - Chrome has developer tools RIGHT out of the box!!! AWESOME! It’s Javascript console also looks and runs very similar to Firefox’s Firebug tool. Not bad Google, not bad.

Incognito Browsing - Now, I’m not really sure of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. The feature its self I suppose is useful if you have discreet browsing habits or typically view sensitive information online with any kind of frequency. But after reading this article, ISPs in the UK might be required BY LAW to store all activity on computers for a period of 12 months. I don’t like that at ALL. Foreshadowing the future, if something like that happens other countries are going to start getting ideas.

A Crazy EULA - It seems like Google wants to take ownership of ANY kind of information that passes through this new browser. More privacy issues? This article outlines some of these crazy EULA points.

WebKit Rendering Engine - WebKit is fast but it only really encompasses 5% of the browsing population. I can see this DRASTICALLY changing with the release of Chrome and I can also see Web Developers becoming more agile. There are too many sites out there that don’t display or function properly in Safari and hopefully this will get developers to be more conscious of cross browser development.

No Mac Support??!? - No I don’t use a Mac but I am surrounded by people that use them exclusively. I find it strange that Google released a WebKit based browser for only windows at first. Just seems strange.

And that’s about it. All-in-all I like Chrome and can see myself using it in my daily work-flow. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the market in the next coming months.