Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 2nd Sep 2008 06:54 UTC, submitted by Renai LeMay
The browser wars may just become a little bit more interesting. Apart from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, another player is ready to join the field in what will most probably be released as a beta - you know, company policy - for the upcoming 23 years: Chrome. It's a webkit-based browser from Google. Update: It's out there, folks.
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Member since:
2006-03-13
I tried Google's new browser, Chrome. I downloaded the installer with Firefox on Linux. I used an extension to tell Firefox to report it was Internet Explorer 6, running under XP. I tried running the installer under Wine - didn't work. I ran it under a limited account in XP under VirtualBox. That did work, and Chrome installed.
I played around with some of the settings, and then went to Slashdot. The very next thing I did was install the extensive hosts file I use into Windows.
Yikes!
Some observations: Chrome uses Webkit, aka KHTML, to render pages. Many of the setup dialogs, however, look like Firefox (the cookie management dialog is a case in point). While Webkit may form the basis of page rendering, Google uses a different Javascript engine than Safari. I wonder if it shares code with Firefox 3.1? Regardless, it's supposed to be blisteringly fast. I haven't benchmarked it, and tend to control which Javascript runs quite closely. The lack of Javascript control in Chrome is an issue.
One area where Chrome may have done something unique is in its tab handling. On the surface, it's no better than any of the other browsers. Underneath, each tab has its own process. One complex page doesn't hang the rest of the browser. Google says they put out Chrome to run Web apps efficiently, and at speed. This shows promise...
...but that brings me to my main gripe with it as a browser. I don't like it. It's missing too many things. Leaving out the whole area of extensions, it's missing little things, like comprehensive text size adjustment (yes, you can specify text sizes, but most Web pages override this). Did I mention extensions? And how about Firefox's native, fine grained control of Java, Javascript, cookies, image loading, bookmarks? Did I mention extensions?
So maybe it will be a good way to run Web apps, but as a browser it needs some work.