Google Chrome. Google’s browser. First impressions:
- It loads pages really fast. Facebook is a good site to check out to see the speed for yourself. Wired has a really interesting article about the development of Chrome. The speed difference will be most noticeable on sites that use JavaScript heavily, due to an engine written in-house:
They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. “We just did some benchmark runs today,” Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft’s IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. “We sort of underestimated what we could do,” Bak says.
- No bookmark manager. Not a huge deal because I barely use my bookmarks. But I chose to import all my Firefox bookmarks and it reminded me how disorganized they were. So I want to delete them all but there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do this without re-installing.
- It’s really nice to be able to drag tabs out to become their own window instead of copying the address, opening a new window, and pasting the address in.
- There’s an option to create an application shortcut out of a website. The most obvious example is to use it on Gmail, giving you a shortcut to open Gmail alone to act as its own application—stripping the window of navigation bars and opening external links in a Chrome window. Right now, I see no reason to use it over keeping a separate browser window open loaded with, say, Gmail.
- I’ve always hated when applications ditch the typical Windows UI for custom buttons in title bars (see: iTunes and Safari), but not this time. Google replaced the space that’s normally filled with the application title and stuck its tabs there. If you’re reading this in Firefox, hit F11 and that’s a decent representation of the Chrome UI.