10 Things To Like About Google Chrome

What kind of semi web developer blog would we be without posting a review of Google's new browser, Chrome? I don't know, but we're not writing one. Instead, we've spent the last two days immersing ourselves in Google Chrome to bring you the top 10 things that might just make Chrome worth a glance.

1. Open Source

Being open source helps open the doors to all sorts of goodies in the form of extensions, plugins, and addons. Firefox's success today comes from the fact that any feature you can imagine has been implemented as an extension.

Chromium, Google Chrome's open source project was opened shortly after the beta release. Here's a couple of tidbits you might be interested in. Chromium uses Subversion as it's version control system and it was written in C++ using Visual Studio 2005.

2. The Speed

Holy crap, Chrome is fast. The UI is responsive, pages load quickly, and the Javascript is blazing fast. CNET compiled a nice set of benchmarks comparing Chrome to the other major browsers and the end results speak for themselves.

Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News

Chrome won't be holding the top spot for long if Tracemonkey lives up to its reputation. According to a press release from Mozilla, Firefox 3.1's Javascript engine will be faster than Chrome's V8.

3. Existing Rendering Engine - WebKit

It's not that I like WebKit. It has quirks just like every other rendering engine. What I like is that Google decided to use an existing engine to power Chrome instead of rolling their own. Every site we build here at SOTC goes through the gambit of browsers - Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, and Opera. It's challenging enough making a site work across the board and the last thing web developers need is another browser to add to the list. In most cases, a site made to work in Safari will work in Chrome without any problems.

4. Tab Processes

Every tab you create in Chrome spawns a new process (unless two tabs are visiting sites with the same top-level domain). This prevents a single tab from crashing the browser or making it unresponsive by consuming too many resources. Javascript being executed in one tab does not affect any other tab. Flash, however, still does. In fact a Flash animation can render the entire browser unusable if it's using the entire processor. It's something all browsers suffer from and hopefully Adobe will address it in the future.

5. The Task Manager

Every tab and every plugin are displayed in Chrome's task manager. This helpful little utility makes finding the site or plugin that is hosing the processor much easier than it used to be.

6. Text Search Location Highlighting

Ok, so I don't know the technical term for this feature, but when you search for text (control-F), Chrome will highlight on the scrollbar places in the document where that term is found. It's a simple feature, but one that is extremely useful.

7. The Omnibar

Chrome's Omnibar is pretty close to Firefox's Awesome Bar, with a few exceptions. First of all, the Omnibar will suggest other sites for you that you haven't even visited yet. It's also a replacement for the search box. Just type something in the box and if it's not a website, it will search for the term using the search engine of your choice (defaults to Google, of course).

8. The Stability

I've been using Chrome on two different computers with two different operating systems exclusively for two straight days and I have yet to make it crash. Firefox 3 didn't fair so well when it first came out. If the announcement comic is correct, they perform some serious testing on each build of the browser.

9. Tab Dragging

In Chrome, you can grab a tab, dislodge it from it's current window and either drop it on the desktop to create a new window, or drop it inside another Chrome window as a new tab. I don't know if I'll ever actually use the feature myself, but it's really fun to play with.

10. Incognito Mode

In Chrome, you can create a new window, called an Incognito window, that doesn't save any information about where you've been or what you've done. According to Google, you might want something like this if you're buying a gift for someone that shares your computer, and you don't want them to know what you've been looking at. Various bloggers and reviewers, however, have a different use in mind.

It's too early to tell how successful Google Chrome will be. But it brings something new to the table, and competition means innovation, which is always good for us.