Google Chrome - First Look

New browsers are coming out at an amazing pace and though its good for web and internet, its becoming more and more frustrating for web developers to get there code work with all the browsers.

Google’s chrome (Developer’s version is called Chromium) is another new addition to the growing list of browsers and with Microsoft’s IE8 on its way, it will be interesting to see the usage stats.
(And stats on receding hair lines of web developers while working with a growing list of web browsers)

Google released a comic interpretation of key engineering decisions for Google Chrome browser, by Scott McCloud that can be found here. Interestingly The Register have created (through its readers) a somewhat different and humorous Google Chrome Comic…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/google_chrome_comic_funnies/

Google Chrome feature list -

• Google Chrome is based on, built from the ground up with, open source application framework webkit; it is intended to be next-generation built for handling Web applications rather than Web pages. It includes Google Gears built-in. If you look at developers version of the webkit you can find code for all the different Google Gears.
• Each browser tab gets its own process rather than tabs sharing processes .This will resolve the multiple browser freeze or crash issue and make browsing faster.The rationale behind it is the same as that found in modern operating systems process isolation systems.
• Each tab has its own URL box, effectively making each tab a browser window
• Clicking on the Star icon on browser tab bookmarks the site automatically
• No about:blank pages. The Chrome’s defaults to a page featuring the four most used search engines and the user’s nine most visited Web pages.
• Similar to IE 8, Chrome has an “Incognito” mode to erase browser history when the browser is closed—something Firefox 3 didn’t include.
• Chrome can be customized so that the toolbar and URL box are hidden and only the webpage is shown on the screen.
• Chrome features browser extensions allowing it to make hybrid apps similar to Adobe AIR
• An Opera-like dashboard start page and auto-completion.
• On the security front, Google Chrome detects that the website you’re trying to access will securely transmit data using SSL the background color of the address bar changes to gold & also the ‘https’ in the URL appears in green for websites with SSL-secured connections established.
• Chrome sandboxes Webpages, preventing drive-by downloads and installations. It continuously makes contact with Google to update a list of known malware sites in order to warn the user.
• Chrome does include Safari’s Javascript Console and also Includes the Inspect element found in Firebug extension of Firefox browser. Flash runs perfectly fine on chrome.

The interface is clean and unobtrusive, without unnecessary clutter. Chrome adapted many of the best things in different browsers and does without many of the unnecessary things. It’s amazingly complete for a beta but of course it lacks essentials like feed reading or ad blocking, which will certainly be available when the plugin/extension system is in place. The incognito mode is great. This mode, a feature which has also recently been announced for Internet Explorer 8, has colloquially been come to be known as “porn mode”, though as Google states there are numerous valid reasons to use it that have nothing to do with browsing porn. For example, if you’re using a shared machine, accessing your email using an incognito window would certainly be wise.

Web page rendering is slow as compared to both Firefox and IE. Chrome engine performs very well and is amazingly fast for web applications.

“Chrome is actually extremely fast when it comes to rendering Google’s websites. Maps, Gmail, Analytics Google Docs”

Google chose to use the open-source WebKit as the basis for Chrome. Strangely, only a Windows version of Chrome is currently available, even though WebKit is the basis for the Safari browser on the Mac operating system.

Some bugs that I noticed –

You can only scroll down and not scroll up with a mouse wheel.

Doesn’t warn you when you are closing multiple tabs (which I did accidentally and had to re-open all tabs) and there is no option to enable this.

I am a big fan of changing / controlling the background color of the web browser. As I do a lot of reading on internet using my tablet PC – I usually change background color to use System Colors in Firefox (and default system background color to Gray), its really very soothing for the eyes. Well, I was really disappointed there as I did not find any out of the box way to change the background color of Google Chrome browser or use a System Colors option. I am sure this is a very handy feature for a lot of my developer friends out there. Well, I downloaded a copy of the Google chromium developer edition and was able to do it on my own but Google should think of packaging this feature straight out of the box.

For developers - Google Chromium source code can be downloaded here - http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/getting-started. This page also includes a list of instructions to compile code in windows Visual Studio 2005.