Thoughts on Google's New Web Browser, 'Chrome'

Posted by Daniel St. Clair

Today, Google releases the beta of their new web browser, Chrome. The beta is free for anyone to download and start using. In fact, I’m using it right now. Google is truly an amazing company – I’ve said for a while now, that pretty much anything they do, they do it better than anyone else who does it. In my opinion, their search engine is heads and tails above Yahoo!, Google Maps is far better than Mapquest, Yahoo! and everyone else, and Gmail is the best web-based email I’ve ever seen. But will this trend continue? Will Google Chrome be as amazing as I hope? And does it stand a chance against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer? Or, will it simply be another browser choice out there that does things just differently enough to give designers one more headache?

Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way – I strongly dislike Internet Explorer. I’m a Mozilla man and proud of it. Firefox 2 is my standard browser (I have installed Firefox 3 on my macbook, but haven’t run through it terribly much yet). I only use IE when a site requires it, or when testing to make sure a web element looks and behaves right in it. That said, IE holds about 75% of the market share, while Firefox only has about 10%. Even though I love Firefox, I’m resigned to the fact that it will never win a majority of web users out there. So in steps Google with a new (and did I mention open source?) web browser, and I’ll admit I’m pretty excited to see how this plays out. If anyone out there can topple IE with a superior browser (and more importantly the power to promote it), it’s Google.

Chrome has got some pretty interesting ideas put into it, if you look under the hood. Separate processes for different tabs, the “new tab page” and the “omnibox” are all exciting to me, as are the promises of a faster, more stable browser, and open browser standards. Some of these elements I’ve seen before in some form (for example, the “new tab page” looks a lot like what I’ve used in Opera, though it seems more powerful in Chrome), but never all together, and never quite like this. I really think that whatever else happens, Chrome is going to shake things up in the browser world, and if it doesn’t knock out IE, maybe it will make IE better. Google is releasing Chrome as completely open source, encouraging other companies to take their ideas and run with them.

So here I am, all excited to be blogging in Chrome. I haven’t given it much of an examination yet, but on one of the first pages I pulled up, I noticed a layout issue, where a couple table cells were blown out (or something that looked like that) – an issue not present on that page in IE and Firefox. Currently, when Deyo is building a web site, we test in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. So as I sit here and gaze at the cool, clean lines of Chrome, and a glitch in the rendering of the page html, I wonder… I know this only day one of the beta, but are we looking at an end to all this different-browsers-render-html-differently-craziness with one truly great browser that crushes (or saves, if Microsoft lets it) IE? Or are we just looking at one more browser that developers need to test their sites in – one more way of rendering to balance against the others, in trying for a site that looks good and works well in all of them?

Will Google Chrome mean an end to the juggling, or yet one more ball to juggle? I think (well, hope) the answer is in the question. This is a Google product. I’m hopeful. I’m very hopeful.

You can download Chrome (for Windows only – Mac & Linux versions not yet available) at…
http://www.google.com/chrome

You can read Google’s comic book, explaining Chrome’s features (some in fairly technical detail) at…
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

Posted September 02, 2008 4:52 PM