Thoughts on Chrome?

[GadgetComa]

What do you think about yet another browser - Google's Chrome? I checked it out under Parallels and it doesn't seem too bad. It has one pretty interesting feature - each tab is a separate process. Nice to have when a site screws up the browser. Now I won't have to kill all browser sessions.

I'm not sure I'll really use it that much on the Mac side though. One great side effect I could see is that Google could get decent market share which means more websites would try to be compatible with Webkit - a nice bonus for Safari users.

What do you think?

[bendrucker]

I haven't tried it yet. I know this may sound like Scott Bourne from MacBreak Weekly, but I likely won't be touching it until a Mac version is out. I use Windows in VMWare Fusion maybe once a month, and I don't like to install unnecessary apps, which eventually end up slowing Windows down considerably. That said, some of the concepts in Chrome are very interesting to me, especially the multi-process management of tabs you mentioned. Safari crashes all too often because of some flash site or some badly written javascript. I also see the benefit in getting another cross platform browser (and the first for Linux) that uses WebKit. Hopefully this could eventually mean the doom of Internet Explorer, although that isn't something I expect in the near future.

Although Google has some interesting ideas, Chrome will not replace Safari as my browser. My hope is that it, Safari, and Firefox can convince Microsoft to pick an open source engine like WebKit or Gecko and drop Trident, or make Trident standards compliant, something we can hope for in IE8. When I switched to the Mac, I spent plenty of weeks trying every browser and finding one I liked, I went back and forth between Safari and Camino over the first year I owned my iMac, settling on Safari when Leopard was released. I am comfortable with Safari, and will take a much more radical change than Google's made to make me switch.

[divigation]

I think its a giant &@#%&@#%&@#%&@#%up on Google's part to not have a Mac version once it went public. I will have opinions of it once I can run it on my machine, trying it in a trash OS running in virtualization doesn't really tell me anything.

[houltmac]

The tab process idea seems really cool, but other than that it seems like they are struggling to find anything to make it stand out. I haven't used it as yet, but I would be surprised if the benchmarks are at all real. Interesting that they have done it, and I'd love to try a Mac versions but other than that I don't find anything in it all that exciting.

[Yuiichi]

I wasn't all that impressed, personally. It's definitely a step in the right direction but it still has a ways to go before it will be a serious contender for my main browser. My main complaint being it's inability to handle lots of tabs. Safari and Firefox will have them scroll off to the side if you have too many open to display in a neat way - Chrome just has them keep getting smaller and smaller, until you can hardly differentiate. It also uses an older version of Webkit with known vulnerabilities - yikes google!

There are several things that it does well though, such as the ability to move tabs around and then switch to moving them into a new window or another window. Although Safari has the ability to do both, one has to start with a different motion for either action to be successful. And the fact that it does run each tab as a separate process is definitely novel.

I can't wait to see them do some more serious development work on this project. It's definitely interesting and shows a lot of promise - I just hope they continue to follow that path!

[GadgetComa]

Originally Posted by divigation

I think its a giant &@#%&@#%&@#%&@#%up on Google's part to not have a Mac version once it went public. I will have opinions of it once I can run it on my machine, trying it in a trash OS running in virtualization doesn't really tell me anything.

I agree. It's ridiculous considering that it's based on Webkit. At least Google admitted they were embarassed not to have a Mac version ready.

[Galley]

It's my default browser on my work PC. Safari ran horribly slow. It would take several minutes to open, and would freeze for several minutes at a time.

[Yuiichi]

I'm wondering - for those of you who have tried it, have you found it dramatically faster than other browsers on your machine? I'm hearing reports of Chrome being blazing fast compared to Firefox 3 and (of course) IE 7, but I haven't experienced the same speed.

[studioprisoner]

have NOT used it all, only seen screen shots, as yeah... there is no mac version yet

[Ginamos]

Originally Posted by Yuiichi

I'm wondering - for those of you who have tried it, have you found it dramatically faster than other browsers on your machine? I'm hearing reports of Chrome being blazing fast compared to Firefox 3 and (of course) IE 7, but I haven't experienced the same speed.

I've found it noticeably faster than Firefox 3, but not so quick that I'd forgo the extensions that Firefox offers.