Review: Google Chrome Mostly Glitters
Google's Chrome browser is fast and lightweight, with fresh and welcome user interface innovations. But it's still early beta software -- and it shows.
By Mitch Wagner
InformationWeek
September 3, 2008 04:10 PM
When Google (NSDQ: GOOG)
announced its own open-source Chrome browser Monday, it made no sense.
Why build an open source Web browser when Firefox is open source, an
excellent browser, and available today? Google's behavior seemed the
very definition of re-inventing the wheel.But Google answers the question in its comic-book-formatted
explanation of its new browser technology:
Google wanted to build a new browser from scratch, designed
specifically to be used with the new generation of Web applications.
Many of those applications are, of course, Google's own: Gmail, Google
Docs, Google Reader, and more.Google designed the browser to be lightweight, fast, have a
minimalist user interface, and to resist crashing under the heavy
JavaScript demands of Web applications.Google succeeded in its goals. The browser performs well, it's
easy to use, it has some really nice user interface features
demonstrate a fresh approach to the old problem of viewing and
navigating Web pages.Many people are going to want to use Chrome as their primary
browser.
But others, I think, will want to wait, because Chrome has some rough
edges, missing features, and stability problems. Chrome is an early
beta, and it shows.Google designed Chrome to be more stable than other browsers,
noting that users can't afford a browser crash while writing an
important e-mail, or creating an important document in an online word
processor. Chrome is designed to be faster than the competition,
designed to be faster, particularly in JavaScript performance. And it's
designed to work with Google Gears, to allow applications to work
offline.Google designed Chrome to be multi-threaded. Other browsers are
single-threaded, which means they can only do one thing at once, which
means if your Gmail section hangs, your entire browser is frozen.
Chrome is multi-threaded, which means that if one tab is locked up,
applications and pages run normally in other tabs. And Chrome has its
own Task Manager, which looks a lot like the one built into Windows,
and which gives separate information on the resource usage of each
running tab, window, and plug-in.
Google's browser is based on the Webkit rendering engine that underlies Safari.
It runs only on Windows for now. Mac and Linux versions are in development.When you're installing Chrome, you have the option of importing
bookmarks, passwords, and other settings from Internet Explorer or
Firefox. (Opera users, you're out of luck -- at least for now.)Throwing Windows Design Conventions Out The Window
The first thing you notice when you start up Chrome is that it's
different. It doesn't look quite like anything else on your desktop.
You're confused for a few seconds. You can't figure out what you're
looking at.Google (NSDQ: GOOG) ignored the usual conventions of writing Windows applications.There's a cost to that: Those conventions exist for a reason. Because
of those conventions, when you download, install, and run an
application for the first time, you already know a little bit about how
to use it. You know where to find the menu bar, and some of the tools
you'll find there. On a browser, you expect to see an address bar below
the menu bar, the tab bar below that, and status bar on the bottom.Those things are either missing or moved around in Chrome. The
browser has no menu bar, just a couple of buttons with drop-down menus
at the top right corner.The search and address bars are combined into a single field,
which looks like the address bar in other browsers, and which Google
calls the Omnibar. The Omnibar is similar to Firefox's AwesomeBar, but
where Firefox has an additional search box, Chrome combines the address
bar and search in one location. You can use the Omnibar to type
addresses, run Web searches, and search your bookmarks and browsing
history.Tabs are located above the address bar, not below as they are in other browsers.
Once you've gotten used to the changes, they win you over. The
net result of the minimalist Chrome user interface is that you maximize
the amount of screen real estate that displays your Web pages, and you
minimize the amount of clutter on the screen comprised of buttons,
menus, and other tools to control the browser.The new-tab page is one of Chrome's most useful design
elements. This is the page that comes up by default every time you
launch the browser or open a new tab. It shows you snapshot images of
the Web pages you most frequently visit, and input boxes for the search
engines you most frequently use and for searching your browser history.
The new-tab page also shows a list of recently bookmarked pages, and
another list of recently closed tabs. All of this is populated
automatically -- you don't need to do a thing to create the page.I expect that someone will clone the Chrome new-tab feature
into a Firefox extension any minute now. And, indeed, you can get
rudimentary versions of the new-tab feature by installing the Speed
Dial or Auto
Dial Firefox extensions.I tried Chrome on a dozen of the Web sites that I use most frequently, including InformationWeek,
Google Reader, Twitter, FriendFeed, Wells Fargo's banking site, and
more. I clicked many links to other Web pages. Chrome took everything I
could throw at it and rendered everything flawlessly and fast --
except, ironically, a couple of embedded YouTube videos on the Chrome
home page on the Google site. I had to stop those videos and re-start
them to get them to play correctly.I left Chrome running overnight with about a dozen windows open, including JavaScript-heavy sites like Gmail and Google (NSDQ: GOOG)
Reader. When I returned in the morning, I found Chrome's performance
extremely sluggish. However, the browser recovered after I shut all the
Chrome windows and tabs down and restarted them.Creating Application Shortcuts In Chrom
Chrome has a couple of tricks in the way it handles tabs. You can
drag and drop tabs to change their order. That much is common to other
browsers. You also can drag tabs onto the desktop, where they appear in
a new window. You supposedly can drag tabs between windows as well, but
I was unable to get that to work.Chrome lets you designate any given page as an applicationMore Internet Insights
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window. That feature is designed to be used with Web applications like
Gmail and Google Reader, or other Web applications from other vendors.
You click a button in the top-right corner of the browser window,
select "Create Application Shortcuts" from the drop-down menu, and
Chrome gives you the option of whether you want to place an icon on the
desktop, Start Menu, or Quick Launch Bar.Once you've created a Web application, Chrome displays that page in
a window without an address bar, and it looks and behaves a lot like a
desktop applications. I created Chrome apps for Gmail, Google Reader,
Twitter, and FriendFeed.I find this feature very useful. Application shortcuts are a
great way to keep your most frequently used Web applications at your
fingertips.
Firefox developers are working on technology called Prism that performs similarly, and similar capabilities are being developed for the next version of Safari.Security And Privacy
Chrome incorporates the same Safe Browsing capabilities that
Google and Mozilla.org jointly developed for Firefox. It warns you when
you visit a suspected phishing site, or one suspected of dispensing malware.And to protect your privacy, Chrome introduces "incognito mode." When
you've selected incognito mode from the drop-down menu on the top right
corner of the screen, Chrome pops open a new, full-size browser window,
with only two differences from the standard window: The bar at the top
of the window is darker than the standard Chrome window, and the
activity that takes place in that window leaves no record on your
desktop. You can store passwords and cookies locally, but the cookies
and passwords are deleted from your desktop when you shut the incognito
window. Likewise, the pages you visit in incognito mode are not stored
in the browser history.Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer 8, now in beta, has a similar feature, as does Apple Safari, as well as Firefox through the Stealther
extension. But the incognito implementation is more elegant in Chrome.When Safari introduced the feature three years ago, Unofficial Apple Weblog blogger C.K. Sample III nicknamed it "porn mode", and the nickname stuck for similar capabilities in all browsers.
Chrome has a gaping privacy hole, but it's not in the code, it's in the terms of service. Google
reserves the right to reproduce, display, and distribute any content that you submit, post, or display using Chrome,
as my colleague Art Wittmann notes. So if you e-mail proprietary
company documents through Gmail using Chrome, or edit them using Google
Docs and Chrome, Google has the right to hang onto those documents and
do whatever it wants with them -- send them to your competitor, or post
them to the public Web.I expect most users will, like Art, simply shrug off the Terms
of Service. Art says, "Let's face it, software licenses are always
written in such a way that you wouldn't do business with the licensing
vendor -- except for the fact that you need their software." Still, the
Terms of Service are troubling. "What
was that about not being evil, again?" writes science fiction novelist Charles Stross.Bookmarking And Searching
The bookmarking capabilities of Chrome are streamlined. Or you might
choose to call them rudimentary and inadequate, depending on whether
you like Google's decisions.Like the most recent version of Firefox, you can
bookmark pages in Chrome by clicking a star icon inside the address
bar. That calls up a small dialogue box where you can specify the name
and which folder the bookmark should appear in.The only places that bookmarks can appear is on the toolbar, or in
folders on the toolbar. The toolbar folders can be user-created, and
Chrome also comes with its own folder for miscellaneous bookmarks,
called "Other bookmarks," on the right end of the toolbar.Chrome has no bookmark-manager window.
Chrome does not support tagging bookmarks with keywords, which
I've already come to depend on in the short time since Firefox 3 came
out, so I found I was a little lost trying to use Chrome bookmarks.I expect I could get used to the way Chrome handles bookmarks.
I don't need hundreds of local bookmarks, I just need a few; everything
else is just a quick Web search away. We'll see if the general Internet
community agrees with me and Google about that.More Chrome Reflections
A few more features and observations about Chrome:
You can choose your own default search engine. Three guesses
what the default search engine is for the browser. (Hint: It starts
with a G and rhymes with Shmoogle.)If you use multiple search engines, Chrome remembers them and
puts them at your fingertips. When you use a search box on a page,
Google will automatically include that search box in your new-tab page,
and if you go to the address bar, click the first letter of the page
and tap the tab key, Chrome prompts you to perform a search with the
search engine on that page. For example, I did a search on the InformationWeek home page, then I navigated to another page, typed "I" in the address bar, and then tab, and Chrome prompted me to search InformationWeek.One small, but elegant touch in Chrome: Special windows like page
history and downloads history appear as Web pages, rather than in
separate windows.Not everything about Chrome is different from other browsers.
Your familiar keyboard shortcuts will work with Chrome: Ctrl-T to open
a new tab, Ctrl-L to move your cursor to the address bar, and so forth.
lists keyboard shortcuts.Chrome has no status bar -- the space on the bottom of a browser
that lets you know how much progress you've made downloading a page.
Instead, a status bubble appears in its place when Chrome has something
to say.Likewise, Chrome doesn't have a downloads window. To start a
download, click the link, and the download appears as a button in a bar
at the bottom of the browser screen. When the download is done, you can
click the button to open it, or click-and-drag it to your desktop, or
right-click for other actions. This is a really terrific and simple way
of handling downloads; you don't need to clutter up your desktop with a
separate window.You can increase and decrease the size of the text on the page,
but you can't increase and decrease the size of the whole page, as you
can with Firefox 3. And, unlike Firefox, Chrome doesn't remember your
zoom settings when you return to a page. That's a huge shortcoming for
Chrome.Chrome doesn't recognize auto-subscribe for RSS. Firefox and Internet
Explorer have small icons on the right of the address bar which
recognize RSS feeds embedded in Web pages (such as those in
InformationWeek), and automatically add those feeds to the
user's RSS reader of choice. Because Chrome doesn't currently support
this standard, users wanting to subscribe to a page's RSS feed need to
hunt down the URL for that feed and add it to an RSS reader manually.I won't be using Chrome as my browser of choice. I'm a Mac user,
and Chrome isn't available on the Mac or Linux. It's in development on
those platforms, but, as John Gruber at the blog Daring Fireball notes, it's "not
very far along." So it's back to Firefox for me as soon as I've filed this review.I'm going to miss a few things about Chrome: I'll miss the new-tab
page, with all your favorite pages, recent history, closed tabs, and
search boxes laid out in one place at your convenience. I'll also miss
the ability to easily create Web application windows.If you're a Windows user, Chrome is feature-rich and mature
enough to use as your browser of choice right away -- if you're willing
to overlook shortcomings, most notably that it slows to a halt when
it's been open 12 hours or so, and the privacy hole in the terms of
service is a huge legal liability.
All in all, the first public Chrome beta is off to a great start.
Chrome puts a shine on your Web browsing experience, and the vendors of competitive browsers -- most notably Mozilla.org and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) -- had better get busy polishing up their offerings.This review was updated with information on RSS feeds.
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