* JavaScript is lightning fast. 3x faster than FireFox 3 on the Dromaeo test suite.
* JavaScript compatibility isn't 100%. Fails in RaphaelJS, apparently Facebook and probably more. I'm unsure why.
* The download bar is interesting and different. Opens a bar at the bottom, defaults to Downloads in My Documents. Can drag elsewhere when done.
* It includes sleek a Firebug-esque tag inspector. Right click and inspect element.
* Scrolling up doesn't work on my trackpad. Middle clicking and scrolling up/down doesn't work. I hope this is fixed soon
* The drop-down search bar is neat. Press Ctrl+F to open it. It doesn't work in textareas.
* You can hide the bookmarks bar via Ctrl+B.
* You can drag tabs in and out of the window to form new windows. There's also a lovely animation when you move tabs around.
* There's a task manager for Chrome alone - right click on the main bar and click task manager. 'Stats for nerds' for more info which takes you to about:memory - also shows you memory usage for IE and Opera.
* You can add keywords in the search bar by going to Options, Manage and changing the default keyword.
* Passes Acid2 test. On Acid3, gets a respectable 78/100 on the JS tests, but has a few rendering bugs and linktest failed. Both tests are currently getting hammered - I'm not sure whether this changes the result for the latter.
* You can resize textareas using the bottom-right hand corner
* It includes a spell checker. You can't seem to add new words to it though.
* It supports other search engines other than Google out of the box. It asked me what default to use on startup. It imported my info from FireFox.
* On clicking a link it only changes the status bar to indicate you've done so - other browsers make it more obvious.
* Source is available at http://dev.chromium.org/ - seems to be largely BSD licensed. I haven't downloaded it as it's almost 500mb.
The Tag inspector is a Webkit feature, as are the resizeable text input boxes. Webkit has been getting 100% on Acid3 for a few months now, so I'm not sure why your Chrome install isn't.
Fair enough, but Chrome does inherit them - I haven't used a Webkit browser very much before because FireFox, in my experience, has been a much superior experience on both GNOME and Windows than their Webkit alternatives.
There's auto-suggest for javascript object names in the Firebug-esque console. Unfortunately you can't drill down into the object as far as I can tell.
Not only does it feel much faster than Firefox/IE, but everything is much simpler. They stripped away all the unnecessary toolbars and menus, and the configuration options are much simpler.
It's like it's doing to Firefox what Firefox did to Mozilla. Strip away the fluff to have a slim browser that does what you want. They keep harping on how it's open source and that their great ideas will improve the web. Wasn't that the goal of Firefox (née Phoenix)?
I guess they didn't want to deal with trying to have their developers help fix Firefox. Sometimes, it's just easier to start over.
It'll be interesting to see how plug-ins play out. Google probably does not need to provide the most feature filled browser as a core offering. Providing a simple and highly robust browser is probably more ideal. Do less but be indispensable at what you do.
I see this as a move that forces standards. Google is putting its big shoulder behind increased performance and consistency on the internet. If other people want to wrap the core offering in fancier clothes, I think Google still wins.
mixmax pointed out to me awhile back that even though that's the popular impression, their visual design is actually quite in depth. For instance, he said to consider the difference between the Google front page logo with and without shadows.
I like the fact that by default it looks like I always tuned my Opera to look! And it borrowed the home(new tab) page from Opera. Though, on second thought, I turned off this feature in Opera. I hope I can turn it off in Chrome?
Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571
Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.
On a P4/2.4GHz with 768 MB of RAM running XP (spare pc).
JavaScript Performance Tests - http://dromaeo.com/
Google Chrome - 705.00ms (Total),
Firefox 3 - 3303.40ms (Total),
Safari 3.1.2 - 3888.20ms (Total),
IE7 - Crashed the browser on "base 64 Encoding and Decoding v122" test. It was also very slow on the 1st 2 tests.
fwiw, WebKit (r36053) nightly ran the tests in 794.80ms and the latest FF3.1 nightly Gecko/20080903051823) was nearly double Chrome, running at 1343.40ms
Welcome to WebKit, sir. It's always this fast for those of us that use it.
Part of me is a little irked that google is going to get credit with many people for things like "Inspect Element". But it's entirely Apple's fault for keeping Safari so far behind the state of Webkit.
I just installed it - and I feel this will be the same experience as when I went from Hotbot to Google way back when. A friend told me about this wicked new search engine, and after having used it once I never used hotbot again.
For that reason alone I'm stuck on Firefox for a while. I tried moving to Safari a few months back when they updated webkit, but I needed firebug, greasemonkey, compete etc.
Google will try to make switching from FF/Safari/IE as swift as possible, which means they will have to deal with the add-ons. The "Import Settings" thingy is not enough.
More features, you mean. I'm not even gonna bother with chrome when it comes out for linux. I have dozens of extensions & mousegestures alone can't be traded for any number of milliseconds.
My only complaint so far is that I miss the bar at the bottom of the browser that typically displays the active link and download status. I find the little pop-up distracting.
If this survives the day without a stability issue it becomes my primary browser.
Looks like they made some minor adjustments for keyboard-only types: instead of a dotted gray box, they highlight whatever item you've tabbed to with a more visible yellow box.
And text boxes are expandable! (Or is this a News.YC feature I missed?)
Edit: Last paragraph wrong on both counts; see response.
Several things about the tab interface bother me:
- Double clicking on the tab bar to open a new tab just resizes the window because it's actually the title bar
- There is no window menu icon in the top left, so double clicking there doesn't close the browser
- Closing all tabs closes the application
It's certainly fast, though, and probably will supplant FireFox as my gmail browser. The tab switching animation is slick too. Definitely looking forward to how this develops. Seems more like a web application browser and less like a web page browser, which is obviously something Google needs to seriously attack Microsoft's desktop monopolies.
Yeah, I dig it for real. Unfortunately, there are three Opera features that I have come to require -- direction-key navigation among links; mouse gestures for Forward and Back; and named searches* created by right-clicking search fields on sites. If plugins fill these holes, I will seriously consider using this.
* For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on.
Q: It's open source, iron_ball, why not write your own?
For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on.
It's not quite as easy as right clicking the search box in Chrome, but you can still do it by right clicking the address bar and going to Edit search engines. You can manually add named searches there. After the first time you search on certain sites, it will automatically add them as named searches (I noticed this with Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia--you'll see them show up in the Edit search engines area).
for me it's fast loading lean webpages (like google results pages,) but on most pages i can't tell the difference between it and FF3
on a Blogger operation (hitting the preview button with a lot of HTML in the editbox, which performs some processing on it) FF3 is faster. i don't know what the difference is due to -- guessing string or DOM operations
Its scrolling, both for page-up/down, scroll-wheels and touchpads seems to be set about 3-4x more sensitive than in other browsers or applications in general.
This gives it a nice illusion of speed, but it gets annoying pretty fast once you realize you want to scroll with any kind of precision without needing to have a lifetime of training in FPSes.
I'm running it in vmware on a mac, I don't like how it scrolls. Using the touchpad on a macbook, you can scroll down a pixel at a time if you move slowly.
The smallest quanta I can scroll with the touchpad via vmware running vista is far too large.
I really hope the native mac version scrolls better.
Note: If you want to use a Chromium-based browser, you should look elsewhere. Although many Chromium modules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, nothing actually runs.
Check out the "Google Chrome Terms of Service": anything you post or transmit with Chrome can be used by Google in any way it wants, for all time. They can display your writings in public, modify it, or both.
This applies to everything you transmit using Chrome, no matter how private it may seem, no matter if it's encrypted, no matter if you're sending it to friends, family, lovers, business partners, employers, financial services planners...
What was that slogan? "Don't be evil"?
"11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
"11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services."
It is strange that up to now there have been virtually no comments about privacy issues in this thread. It is clear to me that for a company in the advertising business the prime reason to release a browser is to improve data mining.
If, say, an association of insurers generously releases a "free" browser, would people install it?
I was disappointed that it doesn't seem to offer support for user scripting a la greasemonkey. It seems like add-ons might be intentionally discouraged:
'The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. "As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you're always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken," Fisher says.'
That does /not/ say that add-ons are discouraged, merely that they chose to make a browser on their own because current add-ons (and backward compatibility) would restrict their power if they had chosen to revamp current browsers.
Everybody's really fond of their add-ons (I couldn't live without Tree Style Tabs), so either Google will implement them to grab more market share or hackers will add them.
Notice Chrome is slower in the first test because of the AJAX declarations. But honestly, who is going to be worried about the speed of AJAX declarations? Look at this comparison:
Chrome:
Array object
131
Date object
30
Error handling
7
Math object
13
RegEx object
52
String object
41
DOM
51
Ajax declarations
295
Total Duration
620
Opera:
Array object 172
Date object 47
Error handling 31
Math object 47
RegEx object 109
String object 63
DOM 31
Ajax declarations 62
Total Duration 562
If we assume Google can get AJAX declaration down to 62ms just like Opera (which seems perfectly reasonable, I don't imagine they had those in mind when considering speed), ten that would bring Chrome's execution time down to:
387ms!!
Assuming it can get a few more milliseconds down (it is after all only in beta stage, now that it's been open-sourced I can imagine a good couple of improvements will stream in), that means it's 1.5x faster than Opera! (which is hailed as the absolute king of Javascript execution)
Also, Opera does some kind of caching thing I think. On some of the tests (like Array and DOM), Opera consistently scored eiter X or 2X (e.g., 90, or 180). There is no way there could be a 2x speed difference just out of thin air like that, so I imagine it's some trick that notices when it can be sped up. If Chrome did that it could have the speed gain as well.
I'm guessing there are plenty of people who will dig the browser, but without the bells and whistles provided by extensions, many users won't switch.
I can live without AdBlock/FlashBlock, since I don't frequent many sites that have heavy third-party content, but as I said above, I can't live without Firebug right now.
Well, not sure I'm ringing the bells yet. I think as people play with it, they'll see there's still a long way to go.
The biggest is that it doesn't do extensions yet. It doesn't The first focus sounds like it will be the Flash engines of the world (i.e. binary extensions). Then later they'll add a Firefox-like extension model.
Next they have their other OS's to support. So it's got a lot of catching up to do.
I'm impressed with it so far, but I'm not uninstalling Firefox quite yet.
Extensions on firefox are broken anyways. Look how difficult it is to find and add an extension. I'm thinking less than 5% of firefox users actually use extensions, but I may be wrong there.
If google makes extensions work better, the have a real winner. And firefox will die quickly.
Worst implementation of bookmarks yet. I have over 5k of them and managing them in Chrome will be a futile process. Clicking the "Open all Bookmarks in New window" button also crashes the browser when you have that many.
In my opinion the bookmark implementation is the BEST yet. You essentially can have multiple bookmark menus for different topics, as any folder you drag onto your bookmark bar becomes a pulldown menu.
Coool. Do you know if it is possible for Chrome to remember the font magnification for visited websites? In FF, I usually enlarge website font, and FF remembers my choice. Chrome doesn't do this automatically.
There will be an extension API. I'm doubtful they'll blacklist extensions. I also doubt Google is worried about the extremely small minority of power users that are blocking ads. So you'll never see ad blocking built in, but I'd bet there will be an extension for it.
It's open source, and ad blocking is the #1 requested feature of browsers. There's probably a reason why it isn't baked in to start, but it will get added.
The "stats for nerds" page is also good entertainment (available from the task manager or by typing about:memory).
Not only will it tell you where all that memory is being used (Chrome isn't exactly lightweight), but it will also spy on IE and Firefox and let you know how much memory they are using.
It also defaults to whatever language locale google decides you should have, with no option to change it.
Apart from going back to the download page, and explicitly choosing it there, and then downloading the download-installer which respects that software should be in English.
No, English is not my first language, but Jesus christ things like this pisses me off.
Can't pull a tab out of firefox to start a new window, though. That's something I tried to do a few times because it seemed like something you should be able to do.
Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571
Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.
Looks like they're making an offensive move towards Silverlight. The Silverlight plug-in loads but the way in which Silverlight loads content from the web looks like it is broken. Anyone else get past the "Loading showcase" label here: http://silverlight.net/showcase/
If you want to test the GC in Javascript, try out an infinite loop of unreferenced allocations. Generational GC should be able to handle this without breaking a sweat.
Actually, I wasn't trying to test the javascript VM at all, just how the browser handled an infinite loop of alert dialogs. Since alert windows steal focus, an infinite loop of them will keep stealing focus. I wanted to know how Chrome would handle this.
I didn't think you were barking up the wrong tree. It's another suggestion. You might need some kind of "yield" statement if you want to see how another Javascript program will act with a background window spamming it with allocations.
The browser is amazingly fast, clean, well-designed (great Omnibox) but the comic-book-style explanation... really? That little digitomb took away whatever load-time I would have saved the rest of the week.
Fonts definitely need some attention from a graphics person. My company's intranet time reporting app looks like it was re-rendered by a techie -- the fonts are small and seem to be designed as bitmaps with no eye to anti-aliasing. It's much more functional, but it looks like crap.
Does not work at all on my computer (Vista). It starts up OK, but I get a window saying "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click OK to terminate the application." whenever I try to load anything.
Is it just me, or does spawning a new process per tab - which makes perfect sense when the tab contains an actual web-app - seem like overkill if it's only to read a document?
That said, if Chrome provided some equivalent of Live Bookmarks, I'd reconcile myself to the profligate process spwaning.
1. The plugin interface to adobe doesn't seem like it's quite there just yet. I had some significant slowdowns with trying to get to other tabs and with responsiveness.
2. There were a few cases where new tabs didn't seem to load in the background... has anyone else encoutnered this?
Anyone know which icon is Chrome using when it makes app shortcuts? For my site it used favicon but it definitely used a bigger icon. I've looked at Gmail's favicon.ico file but it's not a multirez one.. it's just a plain little 16x16 icon...
* I miss the Firefox upper right corner search bar.
* Not crashing the whole browser when one tab crashes is obviously very good(why hasn't this been solved before? has been a problem for so long and a very obvious one too)
Nice.
The simplicity is OK, I never use the menu bar anyway.
Still, I love my FireBug, the EULA sucks and there's no noticeable speed difference with Firefox on my machine, honestly.
Back to Firefox.
Nice.
The simplicity is OK, I never use the menu bar anyway.
Still, I love my FireBug, the EULA sucks and there's noticeable difference with Firefox on my machine, honestly.
Back to Firefox.
This is pretty close to extraordinary. This thing is pitch-perfect. It's like the best parts of Firefox and Safari and Opera merged. I can't wait for this to come out for the Mac, now.
Hm, Chrome doesn't seem to fill the _charset_ hidden input. Interesting, whether it's just that the feature is not yet implemented, or they don't consider it to be useful/good.
Fast, clean interface but no way to send a link, no highlighting of search terms, redundant delete icon on every tab instead of one on the side for the tab in focus.
It seems to flow nicely. I can inspect dynamically created elements by right clicking on them, where in FireBug somehow the link kept getting activated.
I also like how it computes the styles, but I'm not sure how to track down the computations. However, these are all my falling-outs. The browser works nicely.
Although, Shockwave Flash just crashed while listening to pandora and using the webkit inspector. Related?
Not saying it's all bad, and I realize this is a first release, but if Google wants to avoid the "MS Vista" stamp when it comes to software-making they might consider fixing up the following points:
1. Downloading the "installer" doesn't download the complete software.
2. Installer presents everything in Norwegian, with no choice of English. I want my software in English, end of story. There is no way to select English, so for now I assume this is based on some Windows locale-settings which I will just configure properly after install.
3. Configuration hangs to the point of me almost killing the process. After eating a few minutes worth of 100% CPU time, Chrome launches. No feedback is given during this period that it is actually working on anything at all.
4. Once running, Chrome is still in Norwegian mode.
5. Options (or "Alternativer") shows no way to select a English UI language.
6. The language-pack seems to include a spell-checking. This entire text-box is filled with red lines. Because this is not written in Norwegian.
7. Scrolling trough this small text-box proceeds to scroll down the entire page when I reach the end. With what seems like 200 lines of scrolling per millimeter on my laptop touchpad, this renders the scrolling area basically useless for edits. This also applies to page-down in textboxes. Very, very, very annoying.
8. Scrolling in general scrolling seems way too fast also. Like 2-3 pages on what should be 1.
Out of the box this is not something I am happy with, and this needs to be improved about 100 times from second 1.
A few simple choices (like language) must be added. Better reporting to the user that something is actually being worked on needs to be present. Configurability is shit. It has a task manager for web-page tabs (i.e. "geek stuff"), but wont let you configure basic stuff like if opening links in new tabs should activate them or not.
I'm going to have to uninstall this now and try to get hold of a English version.
Edit: The language thingie evidently can be fixed without reinstalling. I just couldn't find it with the non computing-standard language used in the options dialog.
Edit 2: Now I find that google search always presents me the Norwegian version, not the english, when searching from the url-bar. Despite having "I want google in english" cookies firmly set.
This is bloody annoying. Stop forcing localization on me damnit!
* JavaScript is lightning fast. 3x faster than FireFox 3 on the Dromaeo test suite.
* JavaScript compatibility isn't 100%. Fails in RaphaelJS, apparently Facebook and probably more. I'm unsure why.
* The download bar is interesting and different. Opens a bar at the bottom, defaults to Downloads in My Documents. Can drag elsewhere when done.
* It includes sleek a Firebug-esque tag inspector. Right click and inspect element.
* Scrolling up doesn't work on my trackpad. Middle clicking and scrolling up/down doesn't work. I hope this is fixed soon
* The drop-down search bar is neat. Press Ctrl+F to open it. It doesn't work in textareas.
* You can hide the bookmarks bar via Ctrl+B.
* You can drag tabs in and out of the window to form new windows. There's also a lovely animation when you move tabs around.
* There's a task manager for Chrome alone - right click on the main bar and click task manager. 'Stats for nerds' for more info which takes you to about:memory - also shows you memory usage for IE and Opera.
* You can add keywords in the search bar by going to Options, Manage and changing the default keyword.
* Passes Acid2 test. On Acid3, gets a respectable 78/100 on the JS tests, but has a few rendering bugs and linktest failed. Both tests are currently getting hammered - I'm not sure whether this changes the result for the latter.
* You can resize textareas using the bottom-right hand corner
* It includes a spell checker. You can't seem to add new words to it though.
* It supports other search engines other than Google out of the box. It asked me what default to use on startup. It imported my info from FireFox.
* On clicking a link it only changes the status bar to indicate you've done so - other browsers make it more obvious.
* Source is available at http://dev.chromium.org/ - seems to be largely BSD licensed. I haven't downloaded it as it's almost 500mb.