Google Chrome — short thoughts

September 2nd, 2008

This may belong to Twitter.

  1. Comic — nicely done, but how about some good words for work of other people (especially when influenced by it)?

    IE8

    • Process per tab
    • Private mode
    • Emphasis of domain name in the address bar

    Opera

    • Search shortcuts
    • Speed dial (but Google improved it)
    • Tabs on top of address bar (which is the sane way to do it)

    Firefox

    • Search/address bar 
    • JavaScript JIT (Firefox 3.1)

    I understand why Microsoft is not saying “just like Firefox”, however a lot of Google PR is about being friendly.

    Also, I was a bit surprised by the multiple references to tab crashes not crashing the application. Does somebody really encounter often tab crashes? Opera crashes in extremely rare cases, and it is possible to restore a session anyway.

  2. Future? I still use Google Talk (and converted a lot of people), but it seems no one at Google cares anymore. There are at least three different Google Talk editions, with unrelated features (Labs Edition supports text conferencing, but not file sending).

    So it is interesting if Google is going to support Chrome if it does not get significant popularity. It is open-source, however, so my concerns may not prove important.

  3. Process explorer is a fabulous feature, a must have for every other browser. However, aside from that, a good JavaScript debugger is important.

  4. Chrome is a bit of a performance hog, not sure how it compares to Firefox, but it is definitely heavier than Opera, especially CPU-wise.

  5. Not exactly Chrome-related, but why people seem to want a relational database in the browser (Gears, HTML5)? JavaScript structures are already extremely usable and easy to work with. They also abstract fast searching (hashes). Why not use a JSON storage stored in a browser-specific way, instead of putting SQL specification into HTML?

In general, Chrome may replace Opera for me, depends on how well it works with saved passwords (Firefox is way worse than Opera’s Wand), gestures and its overall performance.