Google have finally done what a few people said they would a while ago – launched a new web browser called Chrome.

It’s got some very interesting concepts behind it.  First of all, of course, it’s completely open source, so anyone can take the code base and extend it – indeed, they’re open to user submitted patches.

Speed, security and reliability have been the watchwords for the project. Each page runs in its own process, as does each plugin, so there is no overall crash when a page stops working. I recently found a chrome process was eating as much CPU time as it could handle, so I killed it with Task Manager. Chrome just reported “The following plugin crashed: Shockwave Flash” and carried on running. Nice.

It’s all based around WebKit, the open source browsing platform that runs Apple’s Safari browser, although the version that Chrome uses isn’t up to date and therefore may still have the carpet-bombing vulnerability that affected Safari for a while; hopefully this is something the Chrome team will be fixing very soon.

What is interesting about Chrome is that not only is it fast – blindingly so, I’ve never actually seen a faster browser – it also gives you more “screen real estate” to play with. There’s no title bar – the tabs occupy the space where the title bar would normally be – and there’s no status bar either. The “omnibar” displays the address when there’s a page, and this can also be used to search (the default being Google, naturally, but to be fair it does come with Ask and Yahoo as well.

Almost everything is sandboxed (you can read about that in the comic book about the browser on the Google site), so there’s little chance of malware getting hold of details from other tabs. And it does get hold of Google’s list of malware and other nasty sites as well, helping you to keep everything sorted out.

On the whole, there’s not a lot not to like about it. Okay, maybe that’s not the case if you’re a web developer – the agent string seems to try and be everything under the sun (including Safari); it just has the word “Chrome” tagged in there somewhere. And yes – there’s another browser to test against now (sigh).

Still, it will be interesting to see how Chrome fares in the marketplace. Will it fly? Will people like it? Or is everyone too tied to Internet Explorer (version 8 of which is now in beta) to change? Given that there’s no OS X, Linux or BSD version of Chrome (yet), it may take a while.

So what’s missing? Well, here’s a quick “nice to have” list of things I’d like to see appear in (and for) Chrome:

• Foxmarks or – failing that – Google Browser Sync being resurrected would be nice.
• list of search engines, as Firefox has – sometimes I really do need just to search IMDB – or is that just that I don’t know how to use the OmniBar yet?
• version for other operating systems – I said that above, didn’t I? Well, at least Windows 2000 support would be nice.
• option to put the close button at the end of the bars, like you can do (although it’s a bit hidden) in Firefox. This is something I always do with Firefox, because for some reason I just find myself closing tabs by accident when I mean to go to them.
• something akin to Chris Pederick’s superb Web Developer toolbar for Firefox – generally speaking, it’s invaluable.

Overall verdict? I’d say 8 out of 10. It’s not quite up to the level of Firefox 3 or Opera 9 yet, but I’m sure they’ll get there. Probably sooner rather than later. In the meantime – provided you’re happy with those you-can’t-cancel-them automatic updates – I’d recommend you take it for a spin.

But beware – there is a bit of a controversy about the EULA but I suspect it’s just copied directly from Google Docs or similar; I expect it to change very quickly.

Tags: browser, Firefox, Foxmarks, Google, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 20:06 and is filed under Applications, WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.