Ooh shiny, Google launches Chrome

Google assploded the blogosphere yesterday with the slip up announcement of Google Chrome, their very own webkit and V8 powered web browser. Today they released the beta version and being a sucker for anything new I had to give it a whirl. I decided to use Chrome for the whole day to see if it really is worth all the fuss.

I have to say, I’m very impressed with it so far. It is clearly a beta, there are plenty of rough edges and more than a few sites have problems with the new Javascript engine (although no crashes so far, and I don’t think there are any memory leaks), but there is a lot to like and clearly a lot of potential in Chrome.

The interface is simple and clutter free, Chrome feels just like Google’s iconic homepage, no unnecessary elements that get in the way of what it is trying to do. The usual menu bars, toolbars, and browser buttons have mostly been eliminated in favor of more screen real estate for websites. The address bar doubles as the search bar which surprisingly works very well. Dragging around tabs and dragging tabs out to create a new window is very useful as well.

Having each tab in a separate process is also brilliant, now I don’t have to worry about one web app or site crashing my whole session (something that happens all too often with Firefox and about 5-6 hours of use). Chrome has also included a Process manager to go with this multithreaded approach, this way you’ll see which sites are taking up a lot of memory (Should be good in reducing bloat when developing sites).

I was also surprised at how quick pages rendered with the new browser. Firefox 3 offered a substantial boost over FF2, but Chrome seems to have improved upon this even more. Not so surprising is the blazingly fast V8 Javascript engine that Google developed specifically for chrome. Numerous speed tests already prove V8’s dominance over other Javascript engines. AJAX / JS heavy sites would run like a dream on Chrome, assuming they get all the bugs out of the way.

Granted, I do miss a lot of my extensions from FF (crap, I almost forgot how ad-ridden the web is until I stopped using Adblock), but I am seriously considering extending my dedicated use of Chrome.

It’s hard to believe how another browser can have the potential of revolutionizing the web and software in general (already there’s a lot of talk, both for and against this argument), but after trying out Chrome I’ve been converted from an indifferent pessimist to at least a cautious optimist.