James Burgess

Okay, so for the past few days I’ve been taking a really good look at Google Chrome - and I must say, I’m impressed.  Of course, we can’t take this to be the final state of affairs insofar as the features and stability goes, but I’m going to go ahead and give my thoughts anyway.

First off, I’m going to get everyone’s primary “feature” out of the way: Chrome’s rendering speed, especially for JavaScript, is incredibly fast.  This makes using many of the ‘Web 2.0′ applications far simpler and easier - with response times resembling client-side applications more and more.  With that all said, I’m not going to dwell on this aspect, as it seems to be the only ‘feature’ 90% of the blogosphere have noticed about Chrome.

There have been a lot of reports of Chrome crashing, even despite the not-so-unique (see IE8) one-process-per-tab feature.  However, I’ve not had so much as a single tab crash, let alone the entire browser - so I fail to see what all the fuss is about.  Software will always crash (well, unless you’re running the space shuttle’s code - 1 reported error in 500,000 lines of code is pretty impressive), but I can’t see anything out of the ordinary with Chrome.

Chrome’s ‘minimalistic’ interface is a joy to use, and it becomes quite easy to forget it’s even there - it’s far more efficient than the ’slimmed-down’ version of the Firefox toolbars I run on a day-to-day basis.  The whole ‘tabs on top’ thing, makes far more sense - and I simply wonder why no-one thought of this naturally-mapped option a little earlier.

Of course, there are a number of shortcomings, most notably (and maybe I’m just blind) is the lack of a middle-click scroll option.  Maybe this isn’t a big issue for some, but the click-scroll option is one of my ‘web browsing staples’.  I also sorely missed some features I’m used to, such ad-blocking - but I’m sure these features will come with time (or, at least, I hope they will).

All-in-all, though, I must say that Chrome is impressive, and I hope that the small issues will be ironed out sooner rather than later, as I can’t wait to turn it into my default browser.

Edit: Well, that didn’t take long. ‘Loophole’ closed, and we’re all forced onto the ‘new’ Facebook, permanently.  It seems as though Facebook don’t listen when nearly 50% of their user-base object to the change.

I’ve not had much time free in which to blog, recently, but here’s a quick little script to allow reversion to the ‘Old’ Facebook, whilst the FB Developer application still supports it.  Not tested a great deal, but it should work well enough.  It’ll probably be “broken” sometime soon by the removal of the option to revert through the FBD application (I can’t imagine this ‘workaround’ remaining for very long), but this is the ‘only’ solution for the time being.

Install ‘Old Facebook’ Script (2.2kb) (requires Greasemonkey)

Call me stubborn, but I rather like having all of my information on one page, without having to tab through it (but, then again, I don’t have that much information to view)!

As usual with anything released by Google, the web has been set alight with the praise for Google’s superiority - this time, in regard to the browser-war.  There was always going to be a time when Google got in on the war, but few expected it to be right now, and even fewer expected it to pop somewhat out of the blue like this.  Granted, Chrome was apparently let out of the bag early, but it could well be Google’s trump card - if they play it the right way.

Whilst Chrome isn’t the absolutely huge revolution in browsing that Google seems to think it is, the technology behind it seems sound as far as the theory goes.  The whole Sandboxing idea seems like a fantastic approach, if it’s executed correctly - but people are already reporting entire-browser crashes: the very behaviour this ‘revolutionary’ approach was supposed to solve.  That said, it’s early days… so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Benchmarking Chrome seems to put it at a similar level to Fx3, but not outperforming by-and-large.  I suppose there’s the possibility for it to get faster as time goes on, but it’s far more likely that it’ll get slower and slower as more required features are implemented.  For now, though, I’m going to sit it out and wait until Google revises it’s EULA to be a little less “You’re selling your soul for our unfinished browser.” - and then we’ll see exactly how promising this new technology is.

Update: It looks like Google has made some adjustments to it’s EULA.