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By Curtis Dicken May 26, 2009 What is Goodle Chrome?Simply put, it's a browser from Google based primarily on the Chromium open source project which incorporates several other open source initiatives such as WebKit and V8 assembler. As open source projects such as these go, Google Chrome is still in its infancy. At the time this article was written version 1.0 was available for download at http://www.google.com/ chrome and the next version (2.0) was in beta which was available from the same location. What's the big deal?There are a few reasons why this is an interesting project to follow. If you were to ask Google you would get the progressive we want to "help build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web" and "create a powerful platform for developing a new generation of web applications" responses. What I find most interesting are the developer tools that are included in the browser and the simplified redesign of the layout. With today's browsers you have a generally similar layout scheme, toolbars with as many buttons as you want to include and some sort of tab system. As for development tools, the big 3 (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari) are generally lacking in tools that are truly useful. What's cool…Chrome has all the basic browser components that you need, an address bar to type in URL addresses, forward, back, home page and refresh buttons, a tab system and bookmarks. Of these standard components a few stand out. First, the address bar now also doubles as your search bar. To execute a search just type in your keywords into the address bar and watch your search results pop up. You can even select a different default engine other than Google if you like by clicking on the Tools button and selecting Options. This is hands down my favorite feature. The tab system is also nicely designed. The tabs appear at the very top of the browser window and opening a tab is as simple as clicking the little plus icon next to the last open tab. This may not seem like a big deal but I think the tabs at the top and a simple plus symbol next to the tabs are infinitely more intuitive than other browser implementations. For example, the Firefox method of double clicking on the tab bar or using the drop down button at the end of the tab bar to open a new tab is not at all intuitive. I have a little bitty brain and I appreciate obvious single click icons. Another curious feature of the tab system is the Incognito option. The basic purpose of this is to limit the footprint you leave behind when browsing. Here is Google's explanation of the Incognito browser: "Pages you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files you download or bookmarks you create will be preserved, however."Another impressive set of features are the development tools which include:
Now, two of the most important and best features of Chrome are that it's the fastest and probably most secure browser available. Both are huge pluses in my book. What's missing…Help documentation, especially for the developer tools. If you want to figure out the JavaScript Console or Debugger it's going to be a lot of trial and error. Neither tool has built-in documentation which can make searching for answers quite frustrating. Even the help for the browser itself is rather simplistic, sometimes making it difficult to find answers. Chrome only runs on Windows XP SP2 and Vista, sorry no Linux or Mac. Those are the major issues that I have with Chrome at its current stage of development. There are also several other known issues that are being addressed. If you would like to see some of the issues that the project is facing with the 2.0 beta version you can read about it here: http://www.google.com/ support/chrome/bin/static.py?page=known_issues.cs. Will we have to account for Chrome when we create websites?Since Chrome still has a less than 2% market share in the browser world, it's not really a factor at this point. Considering the size of Google its employees probably make up for about 50% of that market share figure <wink>. Even though it has some quirks and issues, the general rendering of web pages in Chrome is quite consistent and fast. It shouldn't be anything that will alter your website design and development methods any time soon. Will Chrome become a new standard?It definitely has the potential to become a major player in the browser wars but it will need some significant time and additional refinement before it creeps up into the top 3. At this point it's most significant hurdle will be versions that run on other operating systems other than Windows. ConclusionGoogle Chrome is a great surfing and searching browser. It's intuitive, fast, secure and reliable. It has great potential for web designers and developers with some great developer tools built right into the browser. At this point I use Chrome regularly for browsing but I still use other tools for my web development and debugging because the Chrome built-in tools are not quite up to par yet. I plan to keep an eye out for future releases and hope to someday call Chrome my favorite but not just yet. Being that this is an open source project all you turbo-geeks out there are welcome to participate. If that is your thing I'm sure they would appreciate the help. Who knows, you may even get some recognition for your contribution. |