Blogging from Google Chrome

It’s amazing, simply amazing. It took me about two minutes to get downloaded and installed (most likely due to my slow internet), and then I was up and running! Web pages load extremely fast, it’s pretty insane honestly. Anyway, let’s run through some cool features:

Interface. The Chrome interface is amazing, extremely minimalist, very tab focussed, with some neat little animations, but they’re not too overdone. It’s both beautiful and usable, it just works! Another thing I noticed was the address bar, check it out, highlights the url you’re on, with the actual sub-directory greyed slightly, genius, so simple, so good. Also, I immediately noticed a lack of a status bar, but soon realized it does exist, but it only exists when needed (nicely fades in, and out).

Speed. This browser is simply amazing, webpages are basically instant to load and be displayed, and when you’re using Tiscali internet, that’s a pretty amazing achievement. Not only this, but Chrome is using just 44mb of ram! Compared to FireFox (also running) which is taking a whopping 197mb. Now that’s amazing.

Features. Chrome boasts an “incognito” mode which basically records nothing, so yeah, that’s got a pretty obvious use, but I currently can’t see many other uses than that really, unless you’re buying gifts perhaps? The homepage is also different, showing your most commonly visited sites, but I simply set it to reload my tabs from last time.

The problems. It may be in beta, but it’s pretty good. I did notice a few things though, which are particularly annoying:

Checkboxes don’t seem to appear anywhere? (extremely annoying)
It doesn’t always offer to save password (didn’t on digg anyway)
No good bookmarking method, only a simple toolbar.
No mousewheel click scrolling, something I really, really need.
Update, found another error: Chrome doesn’t seem to support overflow: auto; in CSS OK, looks like this is now working, but not always for me. I’ll have to take a deeper look into this. My test file which is working is here.
No design on direct feeds. Also, the FeedBurner xml link doesn’t appear in Chrome (perhaps Google want to hide the fact it won’t display properly?). Direct viewing redirects to the original FeedBurner page.
Update 2: another, submit <inputs> backgrounds style don’t always work properly like they do in FF and IE.

However, from what I’ve seen, it’s fast, it’s simple, it’s beautiful. I can’t wait for it to come out of beta, I can assure you, the final product will be amazing.

On a final note, this might be bad news for FireFox however, even if they can survive without Google’s funding, such an amazing browser like this might win-over many, many FireFox users (especially when we consider that a lot of FireFox users are more… tech savvy).

Update: one more annoying thing (not Google’s fault) is the lack of StumbleUpon for a while!

19 Comments

styletime says:

September 2, 2008

I agree fast and furious! FF was running at 344Mb when i shut it down!

styletimes last blog post..Styletime, BlogActionDay contest!

Nick says:

September 2, 2008

344mb? That’s just INSANE. How many tabs were you running? I normally have about 50 (getting close in Chrome already :))

Itirel says:

September 2, 2008

I agree with you on the bookmark thing, also, more importantly… no ad blocker? I can’t browse the internet without Adblock Plus.

Tyler says:

September 2, 2008

Checkboxes work fine for me.

I’m not a fan of how the file type inputs are displayed though. And really, I don’t see a speed difference between this and FF.

Its cool, overall, but do we really need yet another browser? I have to support so many already.

Heather says:

September 2, 2008

I just downloaded chrome and it offered to save the password. I know that may not be helpful in your case but I’ve had it ask. :) Maybe it’s choosy–it was g-mail it asked for.

Nick says:

September 2, 2008

@Itirel I never bother with ad blockers, but I can almost guarantee one will arrive some time, if Chrome supports addons?

@Tyler as I said in my post, Chrome is both significantly faster at loading pages and it uses lots less RAM (less than a quarter in fact, which is… amazing). As for checkboxes, still not working.

@Heather: Passwords seem to be working on most sites, but not all for me.

Stepan Mazurov says:

September 2, 2008

I’m not sure if you noticed but chrome spawns a process for each tab + a few lingering ones that do not seem to have any affect on anything. I have noticed that it spawns a few processes that are not used by anything and its not easy to figure out which ones are tabs and which aren’t. Comparing

Its also terrible at displaying feeds without stylesheets (basically no RSS feed comes with one except for feedburned ones).

Those 2 plus the fact that I can’t install addons and no OS X version is a tough sell for me.

Nick says:

September 2, 2008

@Stepan: didn’t notice the processes, now I see them. It started off as one for me, and only every few tabs does a new one appear. It might be something to do with the way Chrome processes web pages. Still, the overall ram usage is still low here. As for feeds, I just noticed this, I also noticed no feed icon in the address bar which I gather is important (not a feed user myself). Also, on Feedburner, the link for view feed xml doesn’t exist in Chrome for me, nor does it load (loads original). I expect this is simply a feature Google haven’t introduced. Anyway, thanks for letting me know, I’ve added it to the original post. Lastly, lack of addons and OSX will hopefully be fixed soon :)

styletime says:

September 3, 2008

@nick i think its just a consequence of being open for 18 hours and it all just leaks and leaks and leaks and yep leaks ;) going to import all my bookmarks into google and use Chrome for web hopping leaving FF for only the heavy duty stuff that i need the addons for!

styletimes last blog post..Styletime, BlogActionDay contest!

Avenuegirl says:

September 3, 2008

I guess I’ll be waiting to see if the hoopla is worth it. I think the amount of people who own Macs is highly underrated.

I’ve been extremely happy with firefox for the past few years and I don’t even know what IE is anymore.

Google has enough of my attention with blogger and knols, adsense, adwords, etc. I hope firefox pulls through this one.

Avenuegirls last blog post..In Loving Memory of Roxy

Nick says:

September 3, 2008

@Avenuegirl I would also like FireFox to pull through. I do feel as if Google has done this in, to be frank, bad taste. Instead of this, they could work with Mozilla to get FireFox this speedy, but it seems they want to take over the world single-handedly. Who can blame them for trying!

RaSh says:

September 3, 2008

My first comment when I saw it: Wow!
A typical Google Product, Simple & neat interface (Still having cool looks), Nice changes from the conventional features (Dragging of Tabs, Task Manager etc.)

But after reading Stepan’s comment here, I just found out it’s already taking 100MB+ (With only 2 tabs open!) Maybe that’s why there’s the task manager… :D

Hopefully Add-ons, themes etc. will roll out soon! Till then, I’m not leaving FF :)

RaShs last blog post..BITS Updates: "Start" of Hyd Campus and LAN & Internet in Goa Campus

styletime says:

September 3, 2008

@nick glad you ended that last comment with, ‘who can blame them for trying’ at the end of the day these big corps are still companies who have to earn money just like the little guys!

anything that enhances my experience is welcome to me, I’m happy to be a google fan so happy with this latest move…

styletimes last blog post..Themeforest out of beta!

Hastings says:

September 3, 2008

All I can say is that I’ll surely be waiting until at least a few betas have bit the dust, possibly even an RC. Google stuff always tends to be very buggy and lack a few random features the first few rounds, but they always get right on track and do a good job. Can’t wait to see how this evolves.

Jordan says:

September 3, 2008

If you read through the docs on Chrome, you’ll see that they actually mention that each tab is a new process. This would help to troubleshoot something that’s using too much memory, and rather than having to close out your entire browser, you can easily just terminate the process for that particular tab. At first I thought it was annoying to have X amount of processes, but it hasn’t had a negative effect.

Also, I’m able to use the mouse-wheel to click on links. Might want to check out preferences, or see if you can get ahold of a config file in the browser to see that it’s not disabled or anything.

Other than that now I’m just playing the waiting game until someone ports over the web development add-on to Chrome :D

liam says:

September 3, 2008

I hate the fact I can’t scroll by using my mouse scroll button. But I’m hoping for this to be fixed some time soon. But since downloading it I’ve not used anything else, and I truly am surprised that I like it. But so far so good.

liams last blog post..Contest: Win a Copy of the brand new Papercut Theme

Nick says:

September 3, 2008

@Jordan, I mean scrolling with the middle mouse click, links work fine. (@liam, same point, and I agree, it’s very annoying).

The process idea is pretty clever, and seems to make it super fast compared to other browsers.

On top of that, I too haven’t been using anything else since I got Chrome, despite the bugs and lack of features. I’m already addicted!

Bubo says:

September 5, 2008

ff memory doesnt affect me a lot, in fact google chrome seemed to freeze a bit, i still see no feature which is not matched but a current or future feature of firefox, or a firefox addon.