Google has launched a new web browser, in the usual beta build, aimed at optimising the online application experience.
Only announced a day earlier in an “accidental” email, the web giant touts its piece of software – called Chrome – as the logical successor to current web browsers.
Browsers, it says, were designed in the web’s infancy, back when things were still pretty simple. The idea of Chrome is to bring forward a browser designed around how the world wide web is now being used, most notably, around resource-hogging applications. For example, all of Google’s services – Gmail, Google Maps, Google Docs, YouTube etc. But of course, this extends too to Yahoo and Microsoft’s array of services.
How it tackles the predominant resource-intensive and memory leaking browser problem, is by essentially encapsulating an individual browser iteration into each tab. That means the memory usage of each tab opened has no effect on the browser as a whole, and closing the individual tabs really does now prevent memory leakage. Or so they say.
Blogoscoped had the early dish.
Google lays out its case in a nicely illustrated comic book, available at Google Books, among other places.
My initial reaction is favourable. Loading up Gmail, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, NYT, Al Jazeera etc yielded rapid results, notably faster than Firefox I think, and perhaps IE as well. Clean, straightforward, intuitive design are its strong points. A neat little homepage of most visited sites, recent bookmarks, closed tabs etc. is also a nice touch. And so far the “omnibox” address bar has also proved invaluable, perhaps even more responsive than the new Firefox one.
A big drawback though, is that its is neither Firefox nor IE. That means that web pages, applications etc that are optimised for those browsers don’t necessarily show up optimised in Chrome. Writing in WordPress, I was surprised not to see the Wysiwyg I normally get in Firefox. While signing in to Outlook Express (for work emails), shows a stripped-down, decidedly non-IE version.
Another thing – while I’m typing this, it underlines “decidely” to point out I’ve spelled it wrong, but when I right-click, no correction is displayed.
The major drawback for FF users though, is all those plugins. All the nifty little bits we’ve painstakingly built into our daily FF usage will no longer be available if we just switch straight over to chrome. One of my favourite was integrating Del.icio.us bookmarks into the Favorites bar in Firefox. As comfortable as a browser as Chrome is, it seems like a lot is still missing.
Obvious questions are what the browser means for Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation. Within hours of the announcement, Om Malik was on the line with Mozilla, who told him they welcome the competition, emphasizing that they alone in the browser market, hold no agenda but to serve the web community.
CNET, looking at the implications for Microsoft, concludes that while Redmond may brush off the newly-launched browser as just another in a crowded market, it realizes that if Chrome isn’t tackled promptly, it could gain a lot of ground.
For now, though, Microsoft owns the market. And for that, Nicholas Carr of Rough Type, speculates Chrome could well serve a catalyst for change – a means rather than an end. Perhaps the intent is simply to force the upgrade of the “capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications” Google builds.
Bottom line of course, is that Chrome is one to watch.
