Well, I wanted to write about Chrome, the new web browser by Google, but I can't.
In my personal life, I'm pretty much Windows-free, and when I went to check out Chrome last night, Google didn't make it clear when I'd be able to use it on a Mac, Linux, or BSD box.
"That's okay," I thought to myself, "I have Windows 2000 installed under both VirtualBox and Parallels on my MacBook." and so, for the first time in weeks, I fired up Windows 2000 and went to the Chrome website only to find out that it won't even give me a download link. Instead, I'm taunted by The Big G saying that I must be using Windows XP or Vista in order to take the newest Beta Browser for a spin. I'm running XP at work, but usually opt not to install personal apps there. I may see if I can get it working in Win2K.
My general thoughts on Chrome are that it won't significantly impact the market for quite a while, much like Opera. We'll have to wait and see. With it touting so-called "better security", it'll be a quick target for security bugs. I'm guessing several will be found.
I don't think the security-conscious folks will use it as a primary browser. Firefox has been on the market for a very long time and is a favorite among almost all of the Info-Sec professionals I know in person. Some of this is because of the various extensions such as NoScript and Firebug. Likewise, being cross-platform helps, as many of us have to use various OSs throughout the course of our work.
I'm still kind of eager to try Chrome just to see what all the fuss is about, but you'll have to wait until I find an XP box (that doesn't belong to my employer) to play with.
I've tried it under Vista on a single core laptop. Thus, I didn't get to try the nice multi-process/threading like it could be on a more modern CPU. I did like the seeming increase in render speed and the V8 benchmarks went up by nearly an order of magnitude over FF3 (120-150 in this laptop, baseline score is 100). I also like the cleaner interface. One of the main things I do on a fresh FF install is get rid of extra bars and buttons. FF3 did a lot of that for me in it's default config. I also like that Chrome doesn't have a separate status bar, which I normally do turn on. Instead small tool-tip style popups fade in on the bottom left with link destination when you hover over them. That's a nice way to save me several pixels of screen real estate but still give me the info I need. I also really like the tabs on top design. I'm a tab junky and really stuck to FF for the "remember tabs and windows" option. Chrome does that too.
ReplyDeleteEr, I missed putting in that the Chrome V8 benchmarks were about 1100-1200.
ReplyDeleteFrog, sounds like you should have written this post! I may give it a go at work, since I do normally use FireFox (which I had to install myself). I also think that once the various bugs have been found and fixed, it'll likely be pretty stable. Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteIf I can pry my wife off of her new Acer laptop (with a decent GPU, Vista, a nice multi-core CPU and plenty of RAM) I may give it a whirl in Vista.
I'm actually disappointed with some of the features of chrome. I sort of assumed that there would be an intergrated RSS reader like there is in opera. Nope. Also, I would have loved it if the blank page was customizable, and if they had something like speed dial. Unfortunatly it's all based on history.
ReplyDeleteI like it a lot though, I'll try it out in maybe the next release.
The Speed Dial should be your most common pages, and in not too long Chrome should pick up on those any way for the tab page. The RSS reader is expected to be Google Reader, of course. One thing tht I haven't seen commented on yet is that when Chrome is first run it asks you what your default search engine should be, instead of assuming Google and forcing hte user to go in and change it by hand.
ReplyDeleteI installed in Windows 2000 :)
ReplyDeleteAfter having tried it at work and then seeing all the vulnerabilities that have already been uncovered, I'm not terribly impressed with it right now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the update, though. Did the WinXP installer run just fine under 2K?
Never mind - I see you have some patches available via your blog post with some English instructions at the bottom. I'll give it a whirl, thanks!
ReplyDelete@flapjack
ReplyDeleteI don't think things like integrated RSS support is on Googles mind. One of the reasons Google is making a browser is to help provide the best experience possible to their web applications.. So in this case, Google Reader is the RSS reader.
I wouldn't be suprised if in the future, Google written web apps running under Chrome will provide a true desktop like experience, and fall back to what we see today under your standard browser. But thats just my guess.
Hi to all
ReplyDeleteI am big FAN of Mr. Noah
anywayz
Upto I know about google, it is famous for releasing very simple version in the market
and according to the user reaction, they make their version more advance. So same will be the case here. After some time Chrome will overtake much ratio of the market. No doubt these days opera or mozilla is the best choice. But Chrome will grow up in very short time and stabilize itself.