Google has released its experimental browser called Chrome, a new type of browser built on the Webkit rendering engine.

Google have said that this is designed to be a whole new type of browser, built around the concept of web ‘applications’ as opposed to web ’sites’.  The idea is that the new breed of sites are now applications that you spend a lot of time in, as opposed to simply sites that you visit briefly.

The major change is that each tab in now running in its own CPU process, which means that there shouldn’t be the issue of one site’s processor-intensive Javascript or some plugin (Adobe I’m looking at you) locking up or bringing down the whole browser.

From the Google Blog announcement

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

My first impressions are very positive.  It’s fast, very fast.  They’ve optimised the heck out of the Javascript engine.  You can see the comparison between Firefox 3 & Chrome’s Dromaeo test results: Firefox’s 1983.40ms compared to Chrome’s 574.60ms.  That’s almost 1 & 1/2 second’s difference. Sure that was a fairly unscientific test, I wasn’t controlling for other processes, but the massive difference is indicative of a major improvement in JS performance.

So here’s what I’ve found so far:

Layout

The UI is very spartan. There’s no ‘File, Edit, View …’ menu, the tab menu is integrated into the top window bar where the title is on most browsers.  There’s no search box, it’s integrated into the address bar (I’ll get to that in a minute).  There isn’t even a status bar down the bottom, the link url appears down there when you hover over a link and the ‘Waiting for http:// …’ when you start loading a page.  Oddly, I can’t show you an image of what it looks like because the status message box isn’t captured when you print screen.  One annoying thing about this is that the box that appears is a fixed width, so if the url you’re hovering over is longer than about 65 characters it will get truncated.

The find in page interface is different too.  When you click CTRL-F a textbox drops down from the top menu bar with what you’re typing & it highlights the first occurrence in the page in orange & all others in yellow.  There’s a count of how many times it’s found on the page & you can cycle through the list.  It also puts yellow marks on the scroll bar where all the occurrences of the word are.  Anyone who’s used Resharper in Visual Studio would find this very familiar. One thing to note.  If you do a find & cycle through to occurrence 5 of 10 say.  If you find again for that term it will start you at the 5th occurrence not the 1st.  Handy, but it threw me the first time because it jumped me down to the bottom of the page.

One other thing worth noting is that there’s no ‘home’ button.  You can, in the options, set what URL to open on a new tab, but that page will be opened on every new tab.

Functionality

Despite its very clean layout, Chrome is not lacking in features.  The address bar is a combination of the Firefox ‘awesome bar’ and the search box.  If you just start typing in there, it will pick out urls from your bookmarks & your history.  However the search box functionality is also available here.  If you have any search engines installed (it has a list of pre-installed ones, plus it will import them from Firefox), if you type the keyword for that search engine it will display a message to click tab to use it

Also, if you hold down CTRL after typing, it will automatically wrap the term in www.[term].com. i.e. if I type google and hold down CTL:

It doesn’t do .net & .org with shift  & CTRL-shift like Firefox does, but I think doing it before you click enter is a bit more intuitive.

Helpfully, it automatically picked up my country & set the default search to Google Australia, and while Google is the default, it has all their major competitors (Yahoo7, Sensis, NineMSN, etc.) listed as options too.  These can be changed by right-clicking on the address bar and selecting ‘Edit search engines…’.

There are a whole bunch of nice little features that just make things easier:

1. If you drag a tab out of the tab-bar it becomes its own window.
2. When you open a blank tab, it takes you to a page with thumbnails of your most visited pages, plus a list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs. It also has a bunch of search boxes, one to search your history and then one for each of the search tools you’ve recently used
3. CTRL-clicking or middle mouse button clicking on a link opens the new tab in an un-focused tab.  This is either a good or a bad thing depending on what you’re used to, but annoyingly there currently isn’t an option to change this.
4. You can view your full history in a page that look suspiciously like the Google Web History interface.
5. You can open a link in what’s called the ‘Incognito’ window, which ostensibly is for privacy. But lets face it, we all know what most people will use if for. It’s what the internet is for after all.
6. All multi-line textboxes can be resized by dragging the bottom-right corner.  This is available in Firefox by a plugin, but it’s a nice feature to have natively.
7. The downloads interface is very similar to the Downloads Status Bar Firefox plugin
   
8. The browser comes setup with built-in phishing protection, and one major feature of that is showing when the SSL certificate doesn’t match the URL, leading to an error if you go to https://gmail.com/
   
   But it should be noted that with the phishing protection turned on, Firefox does exactly the same thing.

Stability

Nothing serious. I did manage to make the browser crash by opening every bookmark & then closing them all at once, but it’s worth noting that when it came back up, I did it again & it coped fine.  When it did crash it gave me a popup message

And then once it restarted it had a message up the top of the new tab with an option to re-open the previous windows.  This is much better than IE habit of auto-reopening the page, as if it’s the page that’s crashing, you can never stop the browser crashing (without  killing the process).

On the topic of processes, one of the major changes is the fact that all tabs and plugins (ie Flash, Acrobat) run in their own processes. This is a shot of Process Explorer with 3 tabs open:

You can see there’s a master process (PID#2220) followed by 3 browser processes.  The bottom process is the process for Flash.  In Chrome in the page menu under the Developer submenu there’s an option called Task Manager. This shows you the same information, but identifying which tab/plugin is using the memory

You can kill any if the processes (except the Browser process obviously) and the browser will keep running. If you kill the flash process, the tab(s) that are using flash will have a little message come up that says the plugin crashed.  If you reload the page, it will come back up.

Developer Tools

Out of the box, Chrome seems to have been designed with web developers in mind.  One of the things that always stopped me from upgrading to the latest version of Firefox straight away was the fact that plugins like Firebug didn’t work, and I need them for my work.  Chrome comes with a Firebug clone built in, with the full DOM inspector capabilities.  You can edit HTML & CSS on the fly, and one nice little feature is that you can right-click on any part of the page & ‘Inspect element’ is an option in the context menu.  This will open up the inspector with the element selected.  It also has a JS console built in.

One annoying thing I did notice is that you can’t edit everything in the DOM inspector.  You can edit the attributes of an element or the text contents of an element, but you can’t add attributes to an element without attributes, and you can’t just add or remove elements as you like.  This isn’t really a big problem, but it is a nifty feature of Firebug.

Summary

This is a good browser.  I know Corvida didn’t like the fact that there’s no integration with Google accounts, and to be honest I’m surprised about this myself.  But it’s not really a big deal to me.  The browser is fast (really fast, I mean it’s crazy fast) and it has the developer tools I need to do my work.  All the other features are really nice & the complaints I’ve listed I’m sure can be addressed in future releases.  This is, after all, only the very first public beta release. 

I’ve not heard whether they are going to be opening the browser up to allow user-developer plugins for added features like Firefox does.  It is lacking some of the things I really like about some of those Firefox plugins, so it would be nice if that happened.  For the moment, all Chrome knows about plugins is things like Flash & Acrobat.

I would suggest that if you spend a lot of time online, this browser is worth checking out.