Google Chrome
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
Launching today is a beta of Google's new open-source browser, Google Chrome. It should be interesting to see how this turns out and I'm more than happy to make this my default browser if it produces the goods.
Click the top link for more information and then the second link for the comic book which introduced it all yesterday!
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
Launching today is a beta of Google's new open-source browser, Google Chrome. It should be interesting to see how this turns out and I'm more than happy to make this my default browser if it produces the goods.
Click the top link for more information and then the second link for the comic book which introduced it all yesterday!
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Comments
The comic provides the insight that there are some VERY interesting ideas going into Chrome. I chose to switch from IE to Firefox because it had very interesting ideas and features, and if Chrome ends up being the superior of the two I'll be happy to switch.
Even if Firefox has a neat name and an awesome logo. =p
What's wrong with the Awesome Bar? Depending on what you dislike...
....you may not be too happy with Chrome's Omnibox.
Also, people should name their features with positive adjectives all the time. "Wow, I hate Microsoft Best OS Ever." Every insult sounds like sarcasm. =p
I dunno, it was just annoying when I'm used to (for example) typing in "te" in the address bar, and telltalegames.com appearing in the dropdown.
The Awesome Bar decided I didn't want Telltale's page appearing top of the list, and put www.madeupexamplebecauseicantactuallyrememberwhatreallycameup.com/test instead.
The Omnibox, I think I'd have to give it a go before I make a decision, but hopefully it'll give me the option to turn it off.
Going into a games development course this year, so I am definitely going to keep this in mind for every project
I get the feeling that the Omnibox is kind of a showcase to a lot of Google's search/recommendation technology, so it will be a fairly core element in the browser. But who knows.
www.google.com/chrome
i quite like it. the bookmarks tab should be fixed from the start. i spent a while figuring out how to do that.
I'm loving the speed. The omnibar seems to be more hit or miss, it seems to not know what I'm talking about as often as the Awesome Bar does. This seems mostly due to the fact that it seems to far prefer throwing me to the front page of a site, which means it doesn't know why I'd want to automatically skip straight to, say, Telltale's forums when they have a perfectly fine front page with a simpler URL. Being able to google from a single main bar has already proven to be far more intuitive tand simple than splitting the bar into address and search portions. I prefer the Awesome Bar myself so far. When I started to use the bar in Firefox 3, I found myself feeling like it was an amazing feature. Using the similar feature in Chrome, I feel like it's hit or miss. Also, it tends to ding a lot, annoyed at me for doing something that it didn't expect.
Also, I'm missing Firefox's searching within a page while you type already. Firefox's searching within a page has always impressed me. The moment I pulled up Chrome's "Find in Page", I had my first "Oh wow, this is making me feel uncomfortable" moment.
And the built-in spell-checker only seems to tell you THAT you made a spelling error, without providing suggestions as to what the accurate spelling WOULD be. This is somewhat annoying, because I'm rather used to having spell-checkers tell me what they think I was trying to type.
The minimalistic look and feel is great. And I am already VERY much in love with the new tab page. It's amazing. It's keeping track of my closed tabs, my favorites, my most visited pages. It's extremely convenient, and not something I ever would have thought up on my own. But I love it.
I opened up Options and noticed how very few things are in there. I am also looking at the lack of customization with a bit of a raised eyebrow. But it's hard to complain, when the look and layout is so nice by default. Still, I'd like the option to at least slap on a new coat of paint if I want to. I'm sure the lack of my extensions is going to eventually start to grate on me as I eventually run into a situation where I'd usually simply access some extension feature, and find that it isn't there. I don't have MANY extensions, but the ones I have get very useful when I run into the situation that requires them.
All around, it's very solid. I'm gonna continue using this for awhile, because the overall experience, speed, and new features are worth dealing with the above for now. I'd also like to see if this is going, and whether or not the things that bug me are improved during/after beta to my satisfaction.
I'm picky.
Any one with the know how to help me out?
Why do you want the Google Toolbar, exactly? Isn't all the functionality of the toolbar built into the Chrome UI?
After a day of using Chrome, I've decided to set it aside. I'm going to hope that either a Firefox extension gives me the features I like from Chrome, or that Chrono will improve to the point that it has what I love from Firefox. I simply cannot switch over to Chrome for now. But it has so much promise, and this is just its first beta. I'm excited to see where it goes.
Also, still interested in the rumors of Chrome being the first step in a Google OS.
Am I missing something? Ctrl-F in Chrome (not "Chrono," unless you're using something else entirely?) seems to behave identically to Firefox's, including search as you go...
Yeah, you're right, it is Chrome. That was a slip on my part, nothing more.
I went back and messed with the search again, and it seems you're right. I must have had that word I was searching for hiding around somewhere at the top of the page and didn't see it. Still dings at me incessantly, though.
Ctrl+F brings up "Find in this page" which does highlight words and phrases on a page.
From what I saw in Google's comic, it looks very much like a combination of Opera's Speed dial and Last-closed tabs drop down (both of which I have in Firefox through extensions), except that the content of the speed dial is dynamic instead of user-set.
It does sound like a good idea, this new browser, and I will give it a go at some point... but considering I only just swapped to FF3 and have customised it to my liking, going to a very minimalistic browser will have it's annoying drawbacks.
Can you put the tab marks at the bottom of the screen instead of the top? That's how I'm used to working and I don't like having them at the top.... (yeah, I'm picky too)
I still want the tabs at the bottom of the screen, though
And I need a flash blocker (like FF's AdBlockPlus) so I can block all those annoying flashing banner ads, and keep the nice flash like homestarrunner.com
But yeah, good work Google.... This could very well be a good contender to take IE and Firefox down a peg.
Hopefully it will make them rise to the occasion.
Like everyone else, I'm extremely surprised by the speed. My laptop usually runs like a snail when it comes to the internet but with chrome it's as fast as Firefox on my Mac! One of the slowest websites, Giant Bomb, runs like a dream now... AND ONCE AGAIN, ON MY INCREDIBLY SLOW LAPTOP!!! This browser is so good it's making me use "all caps"!
The really simplistic UI is great. I didn't think you could make something so simple yet functional. I can do most - if not all - of the things I could do on Firefox, plus more.
I love how it shows your most viewed websites on starting page every time you open it, as well.
I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I haven't used yet on Chrome but so far it's fantastic and might replace Firefox for me.:)
UPDATE: My Conclusion!
For anyone not familiar, Javascript runs client-side (on your computer, as opposed to running on the server like PHP or ASP or something) and the speed of it depends entirely on the browser's interpreting of it. Anyway, Chrome has a from-scratch JS engine called V8 which is currently absurdly fast. Some averages from the various browsers I have installed here at work (all Windows versions):
Chrome: 37ms
Firefox 3: 223ms
Firefox 2: 587ms
Opera: 261ms
Safari: 254ms
IE6: 705ms (with a lot of 'do you want to run this script?' popups)
So obviously Chrome currently blows away everything else (I would imagine IE7 and IE8 would put up fairly sad numbers as well). However interestingly enough Firefox 3.1 is getting its own JS engine rewrite called Tracemonkey (wtf?) which is supposedly 16% faster than V8 in its current unfinished state. Oh man browser wars are finally back.
This is VERY good for EVERYONE using a browser. With 3 very much equal competitors scrambling to keep up and gain an edge, we'll see a lot of browser features and new spikes in performance across the board. I'm as excited about browsers as I was when I first downloaded Firefox version zero-point-something.
So, mikew, why are you playing with browsers during work? Usually I wouldn't judge, but aren't you supposed to be doing something important to us?
He's one of our web programmers. :rolleyes:
:eek:
And here I thought all web-related things were tabacco's fault.
That's why I updated my signature
Regardless, it's easier to think of you as the personification of all Telltale web issues. When something goes wrong, I can so easily imagine Sam the Eagle walking through a big room full of servers, beak filled with bees. Oops, he trips over a wire, and suddenly *oops* the buttons on the top of the page don't work.
You do all your work on the site in a giant Sam the Eagle suit, don't you?
And hey if you want to blame broken things on Doug that's cool too. I won't mind :P
If only that were true.
Love the pageloading speed. Awesome. Great dragging tabs so the pop to a new window, and dragging new windows back to thew tab bar.
Not really liking the separate incognito thing and therefore not being able to easily delete selected folder-icon things that show up pn th ehomepage view / history pages in the sidebar from recently visited sites in non-incognito mode.
I wish they'd kept in some of Apple's crazier CSS extensions, though, like dropshadows and transforms (skew, rotation, etc.). I'd love to see that stuff sneakily become standard
I got 262ms in Firefox 3, 42ms in Chrome and 693 in IE8 beta 2 with "Stop running this script?" boxes saying a script on the page is causing IE to run slowly!
--Erwin
There are a lot of cool ideas in Chrome, but...it doesn't completely suit my needs. Yet.