Sep 2

Written by: Mike Cattle
2008-09-02 07:43:34Z

Yup, I'm giving Google Chrome a try, and it's the underlying technology that's detailed by their comic that has convinced me to try it.

So far, so good. It's clean, it's neat, and it's fast.

It took me a couple tries to get the Flash plugin working, because the first site I went to that uses Flash had me using the default installer from the Adobe website. However, the second site I went to had Chrome prompt me to use its own plugin, which then worked.

I'm coming from an IE7 background, although I've played with Firefox, Opera, and even Safari for Windows, but neither of them convinced me to switch. I will have to get used to fact that the right click "Open link in new tab" option is now the first entry and not the second, as I use that command a lot.

Some features that have yet to be added:

A show picture command in the image context menu to force a reload of images that didn't display the first time.
A way to add words to the internal spell checker (a nice feature, by the way).
Support for Microsoft Silverlight (which'll have to be written by Microsoft). A lot of the internal plumbing of Chrome appears to be inspired by Microsoft .Net (such as compiling the Javascript to native machine code before running, and managed memory / intelligent garbage collecting). Silverlight is still in its infancy, but promises to bring the rich UI of desktop applications to the web in a way that's much more flexible than Flash. It also promises to give us a more MovieOS experiences, like WPF applications will give in Windows.
Click and drag of my mouse's scrollwheel doesn't do a fast scroll of the web page, although the scrollwheel itself will scroll.
Mac and Linux versions aren't out yet, but at least they're forthcoming.
More to come...

This is after my 30 minute first impression, but I'm already strongly considering making Chrome my default browser, even though it's only a beta.

As icing on the cake, Google has released Chrome as an open source project in order to push browser technology forward, and is hoping the other browsers will take up the challenge to copy these new features (each tab on its own thread so that one bad tab doesn't bog down the others), as well as come up with something better.

Looking in the crystal ball of the future, I would guess that Chrome may spell the death of either Firefox or IE, and it's most likely going to be Firefox. IE8 is around the corner, and unless Microsoft's engineers have solved the same problems that Google's engineers have solved, then IE8.5 will be coming sooner than expected. Firefox will have to scramble to catch up as well, and perhaps lose a little weight in the process.

Oh, and I approve of the new browser name. :)

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