On a scale from 1 to 10, I am mildly impressed. I just saw that Chrome was live and available for download, so I gave it a test run.
I’m going to keep this pretty short, as Walt Mossberg already did a wonderful review of Chrome for the Wall Street Journal, but I’d like to share my initial impressions. On first blush, the new Google web browser, Chrome, is pretty plain jain. They’ve kept the user interface wonderfully simple, which is very much in keeping with the Google heritage (remember the very first Google search page? Actually, it doesn’t look all that different now, does it?)
Like Firefox, Safari, and (now) even the venerable Internet Explorer, Chrome uses tabbed browsing. They’ve tried a new mechanism wherein tabs that are opened from links on a single page all remain grouped together, which is a nice feature. Also, when a new tab is opened, rather than a blank page, Chrome offers thumbnailed versions of websites you’ve visited previously, trying to anticipate where you want to go. It’s a neat feature, sort of like a widgetized view with non-functional widgets cum bookmarks.
In terms of performance, the browser seems stable enough. If I have the time and the wherewithal, I may try to do some benchmarks tests on memory leakage. My favorite browser by far (almost exclusively) is Firefox, but it leaks like a sonofabitch, and if too many tabs are open for too long, I find that it starts using many MB’s of RAM. As you can see from this screenshot of my task manager, Firefox is already using over 300,000K, and that’s after being open for about 30 seconds. Interestingly, Chrome seems to be also using many kilobytes of memory, but it’s split into numerous different processes. Someone a lot smarter than me needs to explain that, but my (distinctly ignorant and amateurish) guess would be that by splitting the usage among a variety of processes, it’s less likely that a machine will choke on a single point. I believe each instance represents a different tab, which explains the ability to set individual tabs as “mini applications” that can stand alone in your start menu. I’ve not yet played with that feature, but it sounds cool, and reminds me of Fluid for Safari (on OSX Leopard.)
A little bit of brief blog searching (courtesy of Google) shows that other people have explored this issue as well. Pdileepa wrote a neat post and mentioned a cool “just for nerds feature” available by hitting shift+ESC. Newsvine explored the memory use as well in their post reviewing the new browser. Comment from the more educated masses are very welcome.
In theory, Chrome is supposed to offer a Java-friendly browsing experience (Java script is a software development language, popular for building modern websites.) Google is apparently looking to the future when the browser is a true operating system, and cloud computing can compete effectively with a traditional OS like Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, and others. From what I’ve read these Javaphilic benefits are largely invisible at the moment, for the vast majority of websites currently extant. But they’re the wave of the future…
However, even for the time being Chrome is a useful addition to the web browising space. I’m interested to see how my opinion shapes over time, and to see how Chrome performs under more stringent tests. But as I said, I’m mildly impressed. If I were forced to give a numeric rating, I’d call Chrome a 7 out of 10.
