Lord of the Web

The last two days, it seemed like All roads did indeed lead to Chrome. The launch of Google’s new web browser, Chrome, was a huge success judging from the interest its download generated in the last twenty-four hours. Starting with Google’s formal announcement and subsequent press release, searches for google chrome and related keyword mutations dominated cyberspace. Now that the dust has, somewhat, settled, its time to wear our gloves and analyze Google Chrome, for what it really is.

Chrome presents a sleek appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage “tabs” and offers several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings. Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet Explorer and Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the window. he best thing about Google Chrome is undoubtedly its new Back End, unlike nearly all other internet browsers Chrome has the unique feature of running each tab and window with its own process, which has several significant benefits like better memory usage.

Chrome boasts of a great javascript engine, which the devolopers say, was developed to render websites much faster and make web apps more efficient. The results are indeed in tune with their claims, but a browser lacking many key features/plugins and boasting of high speeds can only fool the naive. The true test is when Chrome has all the essential features and plugins, which are bound to slow it down.

Chrome’s attention to JavaScript might miss the point. The culprit is not always JavaScript but another technology used to make Web pages more interactive: Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash plug-in. It’s the program-within-a-program that plays YouTube videos and those annoying “splash” pages that some sites employ to dazzle you with animations before letting you do anything useful on the site. Flash is a tremendous resource hog in Firefox, eating up processor time to the point where there is nothing left for other programs. Chrome also lets sites running Flash take over your computer’s resources. It doesn’t hog the CPU quite as bad as with Firefox, but in a way, it’s more serious, because unlike with Firefox, there’s no way to stop Flash from running. On the plus side, Chrome allows you to diagnose problems with runaway plug-ins easily, because it tells you exactly which pages are consuming which resources through its “task manager”, but still there’s a lot more to be done.

There’s no status bar- it is, for me, very annoying not to be able to gauge how fast a site is loading, how much further there is to go, and so on - so, for instance, one can choose to give up and try another site (or try this one later). There’s no fullscreen mode, atleast I cant find one- you can only do that by creating an application shortcut, which is boring and long-winded for most purposes. There is no “not now”; option for saving passwords. Users often want to decide later whether to save  password or not, but instead all one can do is say “never for this site”. Throwing away years of interface conventions and platform UI standards is, frankly, arrogant and annoying.

Chrome seems to be a bit buggy, just enter :% to the URL box of Chrome and see it crash completely. Not only the selected tab. Its a beta, of course, but a bug like that is too much. It also doesnt render pdf files properly and becomes sluggish when pdfs are opened.

While Chrome’s performance is a little better than that of Firefox, in practical terms, it is far less useful, because it lacks the broad array of third-party add-ons programs like Flashblock that make Firefox so customizable. With time, it might catch up, but in the meantime, the new IE8 will continue to promote the dominance of Internet Explorer in the browser market. But what Chrome represents- a web based OS- will definitely give shivers at Redmond and if and when the completely functional Chrome is delivered, the ultimate challenge to Microsoft begins.

PS: here are some useful “links”

about:version - obviously version information (also accessible by chrome-resource://about/)
about:plugins - obviously installed plugins
about:histograms - hey I love this one! don’t quite know what this all means though
about:dns - obviously just some DNS stats
about:cache, redirecting to view-cache: - list of cached documents, each viewable in HEX!
view-cache:stats - stats for cached documents
about:stats - obviously just some stats
about:network - that’s an awesome tool!
about:internets - oh, an Easter Egg of a kind? look at the page title - The Tubes are Clogged!
chrome-resource:/new-tab/ - heh, a template for the empty tab page?
chrome-resource:/favicon/ - even favicons look like this in the Matrix
chrome-resource:/thumb/http://www.saulis.com/ - this one generates the page thumbnails for the empty tab page
about:memory - nice memory stats
:% - yes, just this little bit crashes the browser, so don’t try it unless you want to loose the opened tabs
about:crash - will display the default crash page banner