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Kas Thomas

How fast will Chrome tarnish?

2-Sep-2008

Tags: Web Content Management, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Google Apps

It's too soon to know what to make of Google's new Chrome browser (I've only been hammering on it a short time), but I have to admit I was disappointed (if unsurprised) by the two-dimensional, low-tech-feeling, all too familiar baby-blue "skin" of the UI. (Can you imagine Adobe perpetrating such an eyesore?) Likewise, it's perhaps telling that the early documentation came in the form of a comic book. Welcome, once again, to Google Beta-ware.

Some random impressions:

Google seems to be very concerned about privacy and security, going so far as to give you the option of opening windows or tabs in "incognito" mode (which is a mode where no search history or browser history, no cookies, no session info of any kind, will be retained; think of it as a cover-your-tracks kind of thing, the kind of window certain individuals might use to play World of Warcraft at work, say). However, when you create a new tab (incognito or not), a list of your most recent bookmarks is shown prominently along the right edge of the window, in plain view. (And you can't get rid of them.) Worse, if you open an "incognito" window and create a bookmark in that window, the bookmark shows up in the "recent bookmarks" list of any new tab, incognito or not. So if you've been bookmarking Flash game sites, it's all there for your boss to see. Drat!

One of the claims to fame of Chrome is supposedly that its various tabs and windows execute in completely separate threads (so that all can hog the CPU, instead of just one, I suppose). Why the average user would care about such a thing, I have no clue. I will say this, however: Chrome (at least on my machine) is an absolute CPU hog. It eventually bogs my whole machine down, even when it's just idling in the background.

The Chrome Javascript console is far nicer than Firefox's, but that's the only piece of Google Chrome that out-Mozillas Mozilla, as far as I'm concerned, and not by a terribly large margin. In fact, I still prefer Firebug (as a debugging tool) over the Chrome console. But at least the Chrome console has type-ahead. On the plus side, it looks like the Google guys retained things like the XMLSerializer object from Mozilla. On the down side, they completely left out the ECMAScript for XML extensions, also known as E4X, or ECMA-357. And of course, you can't run Greasemonkey in it.

It's early, as I say, but at this point Google's browser feels (to me, at least) like a cosmetically challenged knockoff of Firefox. It's a prototypical example of betaware, Google-style. Functional but ugly, buggy but free. Ultimately, though, it's just what CMS, ECM, and DAM vendors don't need: yet another browser to support.