What’s good

On the positive side, there are some reports that Chrome’s market share has already surpassed that of Opera, coming in at close to 2.5% when I last checked. These results should be taken with a grain of salt, as Clicky’s web analytics might only be used by websites that tend to be visited by those more technically-inclined and thus more likely to try out something like Chrome. (Though Chrome’s visibility on Google’s main page no doubt has some small part in its fast growth)

For what it’s worth, Google Analytics on my lowly-trafficked site amounted to over 4% of hits in the past five days. (Google Analytics has since started identifying Chrome as a specific browser type, no surprise)

Chrome browser share on my site

What’s iffy

While the V8 JavaScript engine of Chrome was reported to be fast (myself included) Mozilla has fired back with their own results when compared to the upcoming Firefox 3.1, which also features a newer, faster JavaScript engine dubbed TraceMonkey.

Even if this only manages to bring Firefox 3.1 to within striking distance of Chrome for JavaScript performance, it’ll still easily hand the win over to Firefox 3.1 considering its much larger established base and support for extensions/addons.

Microsoft, meanwhile, still seems to have their heads in the sand when it comes to IE. True, IE7 still have a substantial margin on any other browser but that lead has been steadily sinking. Though IE8 will likely be a vast improvement over IE7 and seeks to erase all memories of the abomination that was IE6, it looks like Microsoft will have its work cut out with the stiff competition from Firefox and Chrome.

Problems

The release was not without controversy, as since this product was from Google, many privacy concerns were voiced. There were concerns about the “GoogleUpdate.exe” process that is installed with Chrome, which apparently allows for higher privileges to install software, which understandably freaked out some users. Generally, unwanted processes running in the background are just the thing the tinfoil-hat wearers are looking for.

Additionally, some keen-eyed users who perused the EULA discovered that Google had apparently tried to claim ownership of all content posted through Chrome. (Who actually reads a EULA?) Evidently, it was all a mishap, as Google quickly moved to correct the errors in the TOS. Apparently, in the rush to release Chrome, a “standard” TOS was used as the basis for the EULA, most likely similar to the ones covering services like Blogger, etc.

My own experiences

Personally, I’m very pleased with the browser. The “application shortcut” feature is very nice as it makes web apps like Gmail integrate very nicely with the desktop. I can’t wait to setup my Mom’s computer with shortcuts to things like Gmail that will undoubtedly make her life easier.

The JavaScript performance is very fast compared to other browsers, but some things like Flash are still buggy at times. This has caused problems with sites like Google Finance (which uses Flash for the charts) and YouTube, which are ironically Google’s own services.

I guess the “Beta” tag and the lack of a full version number excuse these problems, though it looks as if the list of bugs is already quite extensive. Google’s bug tracker for Chrome lists over a thousand bugs/feature requests currently, though likely many of them are duplicates. (Google is, however, following the trend of using the “Beta” moniker in an increasingly loose manner)

After much speculation yesterday, marked by a leaked web comic and finally an acknowledgment by Google, Google Chrome, the much anticipated web browser, is here.

I encourage you to download it and give it a try, as I did as soon as it came out. Here are some of my initial impressions.

Overview

Google released a fairly long web comic that delves into quite a bit of detail about Chrome - it’s not your typical comic! Touted as being built “from scratch”, Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, the same one that powers Safari and Konqueror.

The first thing you notice is how minimal the “Chrome” or UI of Chrome is. If you’re used to a half-dozen toolbars, buttons and widgets all over the place, Chrome will seem like a greenfield to you. By default, there is only a tab bar and then an address bar containing back, forward, a combined reload-stop button and the address bar. There are also buttons for bookmarking a site and for page and browser settings. The bookmarks bar is not displayed unless you specifically change that setting.

Keyboard shortcuts are also present so that you don’t have to click through context menus. If you’re used to the keyboard shortcuts of Firefox and IE7 you’ll be pleased to know that most of them transfer over without change: Ctrl-T opens a new Tab, Ctrl-W/Ctrl-F4 closes a tab, Alt-D focuses the address bar and Ctrl-J opens Downloaded Files.

The address bar also functions as a search bar, and this combination just makes sense. It’s something I’ve always been doing using Firefox Quick Searches

By default the home/start page is set to set to show an Opera-style “Speed Dial” page containing most recently-accessed pages/bookmarks. You can also configure Chrome to restore the previous tabs/websites on startup, which is my personal preference ever since I started using Firefox.

Features

Chrome integrates Google Gears to speed up supporting web applications and is an obvious effort by Google to self-promote. This is substantial since the download link for Chrome is on the main Google search page - no small feat considering only the most popular/important services get that sort of attention and furthermore the link is positioned dead center beneath the search field.

The address/search bar

Chrome allows for quasi-Site-Specific Browsers by use of “Application Shortcuts”, which can be set for any website but are meant to be used mainly with web applications. These allow you to open the target URL in a browser window that does not have the menu or address bars and essentially serves as a blank canvas upon which the web application’s own UI can be displayed.

This is similar to other SSBs such as Mozilla Prism or Fluid for the Mac, as they aim to bridge the gap between desktop and web applications to make their integration more seamless.

However, like Google Blogoscoped points out, using such non-browser interfaces may condition the user to be more lax when entering their credentials and makes phishing attempts more viable since no URL is displayed. This is curious since security, “sandboxing” and general safe browsing were so high on Chrome’s feature list - this feature seems to help undo some good user practices of always confirming the URL before entering credentials.

There are also some nice little enhancements as well - the combined address bar/search bar is very much like Firefox 3’s “awesome bar”. Chrome also allows you to dynamically resize any textarea element, without the site designer having to code this specifically in JavaScript or some other client-side technology.

Performance

Each tab/window is a separate process and thus will show up separately in Task Manager; Chrome also offers its own Task Manager but the memory usage reported here differs from that in the Windows Task Manager. To get the full picture, you have to click on the “Stats for nerds” link, which takes you to about:memory

This page displays the full memory usage details, and also, surprisingly, displays memory usage for any other web browsers also currently running! (I have confirmed that it will display Firefox 2/3, IE7 and Opera 9)

Much talk has been made of this feature; indeed while it does use more resources, it also prevents a single site from bringing down the entire browser as only that tab/window will be affected. To test this out, just terminate one of the instances of chrome.exe and you will see that tab’s screen into a “sad tab of death” with an amusing message.

JavaScript

Though JavaScript falls under the category of `Performance` I felt it deserves its own section because of the importance of JavaScript in web applications. Chrome uses the Google-developed V8 JavaScript engine, which has also been released as open source.

The main points of V8 are outlined at the Google Code page for the project, and are quite interesting. One of the main improvements in performance is the use of a Virtual Machine (VM) for processing JavaScript.

The V8 Virtual Machine is different from say, the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) in that it compiles JavaScript source directly to machine code; there is no intermediate byte-code representation used and hence no interpreter is needed for this. This seems to indicate that JavaScript performance might be faster on Chrome since there’s no intermediary. Google provides some benchmarks to confirm this.

From some informal/unscientific preliminary testing, the V8 JavaScript engine in Chrome does appear to be quite fast; loading the same Digg topic in Firefox took longer than it did in Chrome. (Roughly 14 secs vs. 8 seconds over a few trials - and Chrome did not have the benefit of AdBlock Plus) I’d be very interested to see how Chrome stacks up against Firefox 3.1, considering the rumoured performance boosts coming with it.

If Chrome has anything going for it, it’s definitely the lightning fast JavaScript performance. Coupled with the crash-proofing this makes it ideal for use in web applications.

Development

Chrome comes with a nice DOM inspector reminiscent of Firebug. Using it is dead simple; you just right click and select “Inspect Element” and the inspection window will pop up with the element highlighted. Here you can see the full DOM tree as well as the computed CSS styles for the element.

There’s an included JavaScript console for executing code/commands/expressions on-the-fly and while there is a JavaScript debugger included, it seems at this time to be a command-line only tool, far less user-friendly than Firebug.

Not ready for prime time yet?

Of course, Chrome is marked as Beta by Google, something we’ve come to expect since Gmail has been in beta for longer than the company has been publicly traded. Nonetheless, there are still some features that are sorely missed.

The one thing I absolutely love about Firefox is the vibrant developer community and subsequent widespread availability of quality, useful extensions. This has produced such gems as the aforementioned Firebug and Adblock Plus.

For now, extensions/addons are not part of Chrome but may be added in a later version. In the meantime I don’t think I’ll be even close to ready to switch, as I’m very stubborn. I don’t use that many extensions but the few that I do are “must-haves” and I just can’t browse without them.

Lastly, there are always privacy concerns, especially from a company as big an involved as Google. Though you can turn off the sending of usage statistics, there will always be some with their tinfoil hats on.

Conclusions

All things considered, Chrome is a very good entry into the browser market. While I don’t think it’s ready to take on Firefox or IE yet, it does provide competition. So as long as Chrome continues to support standards (which I think it will, since it uses the WebKit renderer and Google has also been forthcoming with their support for web developers), I won’t have a problem with it. I won’t be switching over to it anytime soon, but at the very least it’ll be a useful development tool to verify/test my websites on to make sure they look proper in Safari/Konqueror/Chrome.

The issue was with an Ajax request I was sending. The return value was an array in JSON form. More specifically, the server was returning something like:

{tag:[{id1:'A',id2:'B'}, {id1:'A',id2:'B'}, {id1:'A',id2:'B'}]}

This was perfectly valid and worked fine in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, in Opera 9.26, I got a JavaScript error indicating that the JSON was not valid. It was then that I realized I was using an older version of jQuery, v1.2.2. Upgrading to the latest, 1.2.6 fixed the problem. Strangely, I could not find anything on their bug tracker indicating that such a problem (JSON and Opera) had been fixed.

What was even more interesting was that upgrading to Opera 9.50 also solved the problem independently; that is, things worked fine even with the older version of jQuery. This goes to show the importance of keeping your software up to date and highlights the complicated interactions between different browsers and client-side code in a web application.

If you’re into web development you’re likely aware of the big news from Microsoft that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is now available. This comes less than 1.5 years since IE7 was released, and represents a much faster development cycle than was observed with IE7. (Over five years passed between the initial release of IE6 and IE7)

With Firefox Beta 3 released not long ago and the final version due in the first half of 2008, Microsoft has been feeling the heat and probably has decided to devote real effort towards improving Internet Explorer in order to regain market share lost mainly to Firefox.

However, what’s most interesting and impressive about IE8 is not its fast follow-up to IE7, but its broad support for web standards and other improvements that many did not expect, especially after the poor track record of IE6 that wasn’t improved much by IE7.

Be Ready

Microsoft details the many important changes IE8 will bring in their IE8 Readiness Toolkit. Besides passing the Acid2 test (MS has created a list of CSS 2.1 Test Pages/Cases), the browser also natively supports the hAtom Microformat in order to implement what MS calls “WebSlices”, which are basically portions of a webpage that can be subscribed to, much like an RSS feed. The example shows how to mark up an auction item and its price so that the content can be easily be scraped, organized and read by an aggregator.

Other improvements in the area of JavaScript are also appealing. In the area of Ajax, MS is pushing a Cross-Domain Request model (XDR), which would overcome the same-origin restrictions of the current XHR object. It is claimed that this is secure, but we’ll have to wait-and-see if this also adopted by other browsers. Hopefully it is, if its proven to be an open and robust standard - after all, XMLHttpRequest did start off at Microsoft. Whatever the outcome, clearly a solution to the same-origin XHR policy must be found, since current workarounds (such as injecting a <script> element into the document) are cumbersome at best.

IE8 has also addressed the JavaScript circular memory leak problem seen in previous versions. This problem can occur because of careless coding that creates references and situations that the previous garbage collector could not deal with properly; basically, if two objects referenced each other (with their properties), they would never be considered “dereferenced”, even if no other references existed for them. This has the tendency to eat up memory, and unfortunately, it’s quite easy to do this accidentally in JavaScript. Fixing this problem is especially important now that web applications are increasingly relying on complex JavaScript for features.

From a user point-of-view, IE8 adds a lot of social-web and other features that cut across multiple websites. For example, it’s easy to share a website on Facebook/Digg, or select an address on a webpage and look it up using Microsoft’s Live Maps service with the built-in functionality. What remains to be seen is if IE8 will develop a vibrant third-party plugin community like Firefox has - this has been one feature of Firefox that I simply couldn’t do without, and it allows you to easily add functionality that’s not present in the core.

Hope for the future

All of this may come as a shock to web developer, who for years have had to deal with IE’s hopeless inadequacy when it came to following web standards. Far too often, the development cycle would look something like this: 1) Get it working in a standards-compliant browser (like Firefox or Opera); 2) “Hack it” to get it to work properly with IE. Though I have not had a chance to properly look at IE8’s beta, it appears that this version will finally get things right, making things much easier for us all. Microsoft has claimed this to be part of their interoperability push, but I believe it’s a push to be more like Firefox to slow the flow of users who are switching from IE to Firefox.

The biggest change, and perhaps the most recent, to IE8 was Microsoft’s reversal of how they’d handle standards mode. Previously, they had decided that true standards-mode would only be invoked on the browser’s rendering engine if the web page specified it. That is, by default, IE8 would use a quirks-mode compatible with how IE7 had worked. This was utterly stupid and contrary to the nature of web-standards. A standard should be used by default!

Furthermore, the only reason behind this decision was that MS did not want to “break” how IE8 worked with websites that were previously designed to work with IE7’s not-so-standards mode - a problem that they had created by not following standards in the first place. This sort of reasoning effectively slows adoption of standards, since it creates a chicken-and-the-egg problem - if the dominant web browser doesn’t properly follow web standards, neither will a significant number of websites. Thankfully, Microsoft decided that the chicken’s (or the egg, if you will) time has come, and that IE8 will support standards mode by default - the way it was meant to be.

Some things do concern me, for example, the way “Activities” are implemented. Currently, a website can add in an activity with the following code example from the IE8 site:

<button onclick="javascript:window.external.addService('GetMap.xml')">Add Map Activity</button>

The “GetMap.xml” file points to XML that describes the activity’s functionality. So as long as other browsers/plugins aren’t prevented from implementing support for this, things should be okay. Otherwise, we risk a disturbing slide back towards the day when sites were “best viewed in “.

(As a side note, I understand that the example code was for brevity, but the best way to invoke JavaScript on a page is not using an inline call like that, but in a separate JavaScript file using proper event handlers. Also, one should test for the existence of a method that may not exist, before calling it. Checking for user-agents/browser versions is a big no-no. As far as I know, window.external.addService is IE8-only right now.)

Looking forward

Overall, I’m very pleased with what IE8 promises. It’ll be interesting to see how fast it is adopted by the masses and how this measurement compares with how fast IE7 was adopted. We’ll also get to see if Microsoft’s adoption of web standards has an effect on its share of the browser market.

While everyone (myself included) has applauded Microsoft for making moves towards supporting standards, a mere slight improvement over IE6 is not enough this time. I mean, come on - they’re Microsoft, one of the largest software companies out there. Why can’t they seem to get things right?

The bane of web developers and designers

It’s a well-known secret among those involved in making websites that IE6 is horrible when it comes to supporting CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a format for defining how webpages should be presented. Provided you’re not doing everything in Flash, and care about web standards, you’ll quickly find that you have to learn CSS in addition to (X)HTML if you want to properly design a website, possibly in addition to server-side technologies.

Designing your first website using CSS for the presentation, you’ll quickly find that IE6 is the odd one out, and hardest one to “make things look right” in. Out of all the selectors in CSS 2.1, IE6 only supports a few of them. Additionally, many of the pseudo-selectors, such as :hover, only work on certain elements. Boo-urns!

As most web developers/designers have switched over to a different browser, either by choice (Firefox/Opera) or because of necessity (Safari), they’ll quickly find themselves always having to refer back to IE6 to “fix” the site once things are already looking great in the other browsers. Thus, IE6 has been the target of many a web designer’s curses throughout the course of history. (Perhaps similar to how Netscape 4 caused many headaches years ago - but maybe not as bad as that!)

Corporate lethargy

Some would suggest this is merely the result of Microsoft growing too large and becoming a dinosaur of sorts, not able to respond to changes in the marketplace. A good example of this is their Live-series of web-based services and applications, most of which seem to be inferior to competing products offered by other companies. In this respect, it seems that Microsoft caught on a little too late to this trend.

However, I don’t think this is the case with IE7. Microsoft, by all accounts, has talented people working for them - there’s just no way they could have become so successful without talent. Microsoft research in particular has some really smart people working for it - an MS researcher recently visited our lab last month, and I was impressed not only by his depth of knowledge in his field, but also his breadth of knowledge. He seemed to know, in quite some detail, about each of the areas the people in my lab were engaged in.

Shunning standards?

Therefore, it seems that solving a problem like making IE7 standards-compliant can’t be that big of a problem. I mean, they have had five years - and other companies like Mozilla and Opera have made browsers that fairly standards compliant, with Opera being a bit better than Firefox at standards support. One argument could be that they don’t want to release a browser that’s so different from IE6 that sites will “break” on the new IE7. This isn’t accurate though, as they’ve already made enough changes to virtually guarantee that sites “made for IE6″ will break on IE7.

As much as I hate to say it, some believe that IE7’s lack of support for standards is something that’s been deliberately “implemented”. HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, of Opera software, best sums it up in an interview on Slashdot:

It’s quite clear that Microsoft has the resources and talent to support CSS2 fully in IE and that plenty of people have reminded them why this is important. So, why don’t they do it? The fundamental reason, I believe, is that standards don’t benefit monopolists. Accepted, well-functioning, standards lower the barrier of entry to a market, and is therefore a threat to a monopolist.

From that perspective, it makes sense to leave CSS2 half-implemented. You can claim support (and many journalists will believe you), and you also ensure that no-one can use the unimplemented (or worse: buggily implemented) features of the standard. The only way to change the equation is to remind Microsoft how embarrassing it is to offer a sub-standard browser. And to use better browsers.

What he’s saying is certainly plausible - Microsoft has been known to engage in anti-competitive practices, and after all, anti-competitives practices are really sound (but perhaps not ethical) business strategies that only become available when you’re the clear market leader. And, when you have shareholders always squeezing you to make more money, sometimes business strategy can take a more sinister direction.

I want to stop short of actually declaring MS to be engaging in anti-competitive strategies here (though a compelling argument could be made for this), but I will say that the effects of their actions, for whatever motivations, are horrible for web development. Internet Explorer 6 was a big enough problem, as since it’s the majority market holder, professionals in website development had to account for it - there’s just no saying “Screw non-standard browsers”, when your expected client base is 80% (or higher) IE6. And, with the release of IE7 (to be pushed to users automatically), more problems will be created: sites made to work with IE6 will probably not work too well in IE7, and vice-versa. Clever tricks, whether through CSS or JavaScript will eventually provide work-arounds, but all of this adds substantially to the development time for a site.

So much for the chant, “Developers, developers, developers!” Microsoft, please fix IE7 before it’s widely released, and you’ll be sure to receive heartfelt thanks from many formerly-frustrated developers out there.