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.