Chrome has two major things going for it: It's lightning fast, and it's from the biggest Web brand around. Now it adds a third draw: It's released software rather than a beta test program. Google's famous for leaving on the beta tag indefinitely, but the company needed to take off the beta tag in order to bundle the software with PC makers. Though the software is now officially "done," it's still lacking a lot of the richness available in other browsers, especially in the area of customizability. Nor, with the release of Firefox 3.1 beta is it any longer the fastest browser around, trailing the new Firefox by a small margin. I've taken a look at Chrome 1.0 to see what's changed since the beta, but few of my conclusions change.
With Chrome, Google set out to build a browser not merely as a viewer for Web sites and pages, but a platform for running Web applications. This is hardly a new concept—Firefox's developers have touted their browser as a "platform" for a few years. But Chrome has a couple of new tricks under the hood that suit it well for use with Web applications. And its spare, "get-the-browser-out-of-the-way" aesthetic complements this goal, too. In developer-speak, the term chrome refers to the window borders, controls, and general eye candy. Google's browser actually aims to minimize these, so it might more accurately be called "Antichrome." The question is, do we need another browser when Internet Explorer serves most users just fine, Safari supports the Mac crowd, and Firefox warms the hearts of techie tweakers?
Actually, Chrome isn't a completely new browser. Google did develop one important piece of code in-house—its V8 JavaScript rendering engine, which uses a virtual machine to monitor and optimize JavaScript execution. But the browser is actually built on the open-source WebKit rendering engine used by Apple's Safari, and it incorporates code from Mozilla's Firefox, which is open-source as well. This means it should correctly present any sites that work in Safari, though in my testing, that wasn't always the case. It also means the address bar's prediction and security features should work just like those in Firefox, and that was the case. Chrome is currently Windows-only, but the company is working on Mac and Linux versions.
Two features in Google's browser—isolated tabs and fast JavaScript performance—have both had some thunder stolen from them—the first by the implementation, in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, of isolated tab processes, and the second by Firefox's announcement of the TraceMonkey, which has vastly improved Firefox's JavaScript performance, even beating Chrome's by a slim margin.
Setup
Chrome has one of the simplest download and install processes I've ever seen. For example, you won't find the wizards other browsers use to ask where and how you want to install the product. You simply view the license agreement, decide whether to check the option to send usage stats and crash data to Google, download, and you're off and browsing. Note you can only install it while connected to the Internet.
That said, some strenuous objections were raised to the original end-user license agreement, which gave Google rights to everything you entered in Google software and services. After the uproar, the company beat a hasty retreat, but some worry that the onerous language will stealthily creep back in. Also, Google's standard privacy policy applies—a policy that drew fire when the company was about to hand YouTube user records over to Viacom.
The first time you start browsing, Chrome offers to import your bookmarks from Internet Explorer or Firefox. Your first view of the browser includes large tooltips explaining that the search and address boxes have been combined, and suggesting you visit the helpful Getting Started Guide.
InterfaceThe two highlights of Chrome's interface are the prominence it gives to tabs and its dual-purpose address-and-search bar, dubbed the "Ominbar." You can drag tabs, which appear right at the top of the interface, to different positions and even into a new window. For creating new tabs, a very clear Opera-like plus sign, which I like, appears next to your right-most tab. When you open a new tab, rather than getting a blank page as you do in Firefox, Chrome follows the lead of Internet Explorer 8, beta 2 and Opera by giving suggestions of Web sites. But where the Internet Explorer 8 beta bases its suggestions on various histories (such as recently closed tabs), and Opera presents a fixed list of favorites you've chosen, Chrome displays your most frequently visited sites. Chrome doesn't, however, imitate IE8's clever color-coding of related tabs.
Though opening a new tab can provide helpful information, closing the browser with tabs open proves less than helpful. The competitors ask if you meant to close all tabs, and IE8 even offers to close only the open one, which is often what you really want to do. Chrome simply quits without offering options, and worse, without warning you first. Shutting the browser when you close the last open tab, which Chrome also does, actually makes some sense. But if you kill the browser with a full slate of tabs, the next time you start, they won't be remembered by default, as they are in Firefox and IE. True, a setting in the Basic Options dialog can configure Chrome to remember and open previously open tabs, but it's not the default.
The Omnibar works much like the Firefox 3 "awesome bar" and the revamped address bar in IE8, but you don't get a search box alongside it. Google reps claim that user testing showed them this was the way to go. Personally, though, I'm used to the separation of search and address, and I'm sure many others are, too. The Omnibar does have one nice feature that differentiates it from the Firefox Awesome bar. When you type in a search query a suggested list of sites drops down beneath the bar. Tabbing to one of those sites lets you search using via site's own native search feature. This worked like a charm for me on the PCMag.com site as well as on Wikipedia.
Surprisingly, Chrome lets you set any major search provider—even Google arch enemy Microsoft Live Search—as the default. In fact, doing so is easier than in Firefox (and infinitely easier than in Safari for the Mac, which doesn't even allow search alternatives): Just choose your favorite search from a drop-down list in Basic Options.
On-page search, though nicely implemented, isn't much different from what you'll find in the latest browser competition: Hit Ctrl-F, and a search box drops down from the top-right of the browsing window. Found search terms are highlighted, and you can tab through them with up and down arrows. The procedure for saving passwords is similar to that of Firefox—rather than a separate, distracting window popping up, a bar appears at the top of the browser and offers to remember the username and password as you enter them.
As a key part of its mission—to get out of the way and just become a platform for Web applications—Chrome offers its Application shortcuts and built-in support for Google Gears, which allows Web apps programmed for it to work without a live Internet connection. Not only do the Application shortcuts let you create a desktop icon that launches a rich Internet app in a browser window, but when the application starts, the browser interface elements disappear, leaving only the site with a window border.
When you go to a site that supports Google Gears, such as Google Docs, you can click the offline link to use the site as a standalone application—for example, if you want to work on a document during a plane flight. When I did this in Google Docs, a dialog showed the progress of the document-syncing process and gave me the option of creating an Application shortcut for Docs. After syncing, I could edit the documents offline, though I don't know why I'd do this in Docs rather than in Microsoft Word, which it far more capable. But this did illustrate how Gears and Application shortcuts work together to provide what appear to be desktop apps.
Bookmarks and Customization
With the release of version1.0, Chrome's bookmark support has been beefed up somewhat, with the added ability to search and see recently added bookmarks. As in Firefox, clicking on a star next to the address bar will add a site to your bookmarks, but Chrome still lacks Firefox's tagging and smart bookmarks capabilities.
Perhaps even more restrictive is the general lack of customization. In this respect, Chrome is something of a polar opposite of Firefox. You can't customize buttons or move menus around (as you can in IE), and you'll find no toolbars or extensions. I especially miss the ability to customize browser buttons. For example, in Firefox, I like to add the New Tab and History buttons to the toolbar for quick access to those features. Google has announced the intention of eventually supporting extensions, but that didn't make the cut for this 1.0 release.
Joining the IE and Firefox tools you'll miss is the built-in RSS reader—it seems Google expects you to use a Web-based feed reader. I still prefer the easy access and clear display of Internet Explorer's feed reader, which you can view in the sidebar—a useful convenience you'll find in IE, Firefox, and Opera, but not Chrome.
Google's browser also lacks a real download manager. You can search for files you've downloaded, but you can't pause and resume downloads as you can in Firefox. Still, Chrome does a decent job of handling and displaying downloads. When you begin the process, a large downward-pointing arrow directs your eye toward a bar showing the names of the downloaded files. This download list and the history list reside in the Web-page display area. But while combining the two in the browsing window may simplify the interface, keeping such disparate features in different areas, the way Firefox does, brings clarity that you lose in Chrome.
Performance, Memory Use, and Compatibility
Chrome is quite snappy when displaying and navigating Web sites, as several of my colleagues at PCMag have pointed out to me. The improved performance is partly due to the very fast WebKit rendering engine and partly to the new V8 JavaScript engine. In the well-regarded SunSpider JavaScript performance test, the released version of the browser has become even significantly faster than its very respectable—even category leading—beta debut. From 3,471ms in the beta, it's improved to 2631. That compares rather favorably with 12,866ms for IE8 and 6,701ms for Firefox 3. Firefox 3.1 beta 2, however gives it a run for its money, at 2,689 ms. The impressive showing gives credence to Google's claim that this will pave the path to far richer JavaScript-based Web applications.
Chrome was somewhat less frugal with memory than the Internet Explorer 8 beta. When I loaded ten media-heavy pages into separate tabs, Chrome required 265MB as opposed to 233 for IE. Firefox, however, was by far the leader, taking only 92MB to display the same set of pages. On the other hand, startup time for Chrome was as good as for the other browsers—just over two seconds on a 1.5-GHz Pentium-M laptop with 1.5GB RAM.
In random Web-page compatibility testing, Chrome worked beautifully and responsively with the new Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Picasa Web Albums, which have choked competitors' betas in the past. It also had no problem with financial sites requiring logins, such as Citibank and Fidelity. Office Live, however, still balks at Chrome, with the site stating you'll need to use IE or Firefox. Hotmail now works in the browser. Problems the beta had with Facebook seem to have been resolved: updating Favorite Books and switching highlighted headers now work. I still ran into trouble with Adobe PDF pages; though the help pages state that Acrobat Reader comes preinstalled on Chrome, when I clicked on a PDF link, it was shown as a download rather than just opening in the browser as happens in Internet Explorer. Clicking on the download doesn't work unless you've installed Acrobat Reader separately. Flash video, however, displayed flawlessly in my testing, addressing a common complaint about the beta.
On the Acid3 browser compatibility test from the Web Standards, Chrome is near the top, scoring 79 out of a possible 100. Safari's close, with 75, and Firefox 3 is next, with—71. Opera 9.6 is the leader among released browsers, with 85 out of 100, and its beta of version 10 scores a perfect 100. At the other end of the spectrum is Internet Explorer 7, with a paltry 12. IE 8 does a little better, with 14. Keep in mind that the test is more about what Web developers may want to implement in the future, rather than about compatibility with current sites.
Security and Privacy
To help protect from both malicious sites and poorly coded-ones, Chrome, like Internet Explorer 8, beta 2, runs each tab in a separate processes. With this strategy, if one site on one tab freaks out, it won't take down the whole browser. Chrome takes process isolation a couple of welcome steps further, though: It not only isolates tabs, but also plug-ins such as Flash, and it offers a Task Manager for your open tabs and add-ins. I haven't seen either of these capabilities in any other browser yet.
Not only does Chrome segregate the processes of simultaneous tabs, it even does so sequentially with individual tabs: As you move to different domains under a single tab, Chrome throws out the tab process and starts a new one, just in case the previous site caused memory leaks. I wondered what effect this would have on the Back button—if it would remember the session information from the earlier site—but I didn't run into problems. I was able to check my webmail using the Back button even after moving on to another site.
A Safe Browsing feature supplies the same anti-phishing and malware protections you'll find in Firefox 3. You'll even see the same red warning page if you happen on a bad site. The browser supports SSL and can show Extended Validation SSL information too, but it doesn't support SSL client authentication—a known issue.
Reports of Chrome vulnerabilities have already surfaced—for example, carpet-bombing malware that attacks weaknesses in the WebKit engine and Windows to bring down not just one of the tab processes, but the whole browser. This can happen when you download and double-click on Java archive files, which unlike regular programs, don't produce Windows' standard warning about running downloaded programs. Some security experts have also pointed out that Chrome's blending of pieces from Firefox and WebKit can make thwarting attacks problematic.
Just as security is a concern, these days, so too, is privacy. Much like the InPrivate feature of IE8, which received so much attention in the tech press, Chrome's Incognito mode lets you move around the Web without leaving traces of your browsing. But Chrome's feature has an advantage—you can have one tab in Incognito mode while viewing others in public mode. On the other hand, you'll find no parental controls in Chrome, so you're on your own in policing your offsprings' Web use.
And there's another privacy concern with a browser from Google: Will it be just another way for the company to gather even more detailed information on Web users' activities and habits? The designers have said that the JavaScript renderer works in a virtual machine with no access to the rest of your system, but that's not necessarily the case for the app as a whole. Also, the tech press has noted that each copy of Chrome has an identifying number that's tied to any data Google collects—a move similar to one Microsoft took a lot of heat for a few years ago with the Windows XP launch.
Conclusion
Generally, I was impressed with Chrome's compatibility and performance, though much of that is thanks to the prior code from other sources it's built on. Of course, given that it's still very early in the life of this browser, improvements need to be made in some areas, such as customizability. Still, I see no reason for the average Internet user—especially one interested in a pared-down, bare-bones interface—not to give it a test spin.
On the other hand, I don't yet see a compelling reason to switch to Chrome for you everyday browsing. Although it's built on the same page-rendering engine as Safari, sites that work in the Apple browser don't necessarily work in Chrome, as my problems with Facebook illustrated. So while Google reps claim that site designers won't need to optimize their pages for another browser, that doesn't appear to be the case. There's also the issue of whether you want to give the company with so many tentacles into your Web activities an installed app on your system.
As part of Google's grand strategy towards a future in which all applications are Web-based but with offline capability, Chrome makes sense. Its turbocharged JavaScript speed, built-in Gears support, and ability to run Web content without a browser interface getting in the way go some way towards realizing this goal. But the paradigm is still years from realization: The percentage of people who use Web-based word processors exclusively, for example, is negligible. So the jury is out on whether Web apps will eventually rule the world. Chrome is certainly a bright new toy, but not necessarily an engine of productivity at this point.
Generally, I was impressed with Chrome's compatibility and performance, though much of that is thanks to the prior code from other sources it's built on. Of course, given that it's still very early in the life of this browser, improvements need to be made in some areas, such as customizability. Still, I see no reason for the average Internet user—especially one interested in a pared-down, bare-bones interface—not to give it a test spin.
On the other hand, I don't yet see a compelling reason to switch to Chrome for you everyday browsing. Although it's built on the same page-rendering engine as Safari, sites that work in the Apple browser don't necessarily work in Chrome, as my problems with Facebook illustrated. So while Google reps claim that site designers won't need to optimize their pages for another browser, that doesn't appear to be the case. There's also the issue of whether you want to give the company with so many tentacles into your Web activities an installed app on your system.
As part of Google's grand strategy towards a future in which all applications are Web-based but with offline capability, Chrome makes sense. Its turbocharged JavaScript speed, built-in Gears support, and ability to run Web content without a browser interface getting in the way go some way towards realizing this goal. But the paradigm is still years from realization: The percentage of people who use Web-based word processors exclusively, for example, is negligible. So the jury is out on whether Web apps will eventually rule the world. Chrome is certainly a bright new toy, but not necessarily an engine of productivity at this point.
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