After much comic book reading and a geeky satisfaction that not many around me will understand that comic, I downloaded the much hyped browser and played with it for a few minutes.
So this post is certainly not another review or “five things you didn’t know” or “seventeen things you should know” about Chrome. In fact, all this while, I’ve been reading about it more than I’ve been using it. And all around I see people looking at the browser with a raised eyebrow. Well, that’s expected, of course. We are not Apple fans to run amok crying “oooh I love iPhone”. But still, the general tone does seem a bit negative.
First there was the License clause. Stupid, but not really evil. God, how many people were scared to death by that. As if Google wanted to take everyone’s blogs and use them in some great-evil-conspiracy. Lame.
Then there’s this security flaw which allows the carpet bomb attack. With that we have the already cliched “Google’s Tarnished Chrome” headlines. We all saw this coming.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in for open information and the likes. I thank all the folks out there who are going through every possible option of Chrome to make my life a lot easier when I use it. But it just seems as if everyone was expecting a rock sturdy browser with amazing out-of-the-world features and a memory consumption of 100kbs. Its just a beta guys!!!
More importantly, I do not find anyone sparing a few good words for the bold steps taken by Google towards ensuring a great user experience, even with long usage of the browser. An all new Javascript engine! Separate sandboxed process for each tab! An actual useful homepage!
I understand that the comic (press release) already explains that quite a bit, but still. Few are writing about what separates Chrome from Firefox or IE. Most articles are rather finding content in speculating which way the market will move and which browser will claim most developer attention.
One wonders what FireFox was doing all along. I suddenly felt as if I was just using an open source IE replacement all this while, and not any awesome piece of software. After reading about Chrome, it took me a few moments to remember what FireFox was good for. Yet, since FF remains the ultimate in terms of being a simple, extensible, cross platform, open source browser, I still stick by it (more so because I use Firebug and FlashBlock extensions very heavily)
All in all, I have a feeling that Google Chrome brings in a lot of goodies (and promises of a good deal more). I don’t care if the developer community “splits” between FF and Google. I don’t care if there is one more browser I need to take care of for my apps (as long as it works well with most scripts, as it does now). I believe Chrome brings a good piece of code to the community along with some important questions which maybe FireFox and IE teams need to chew upon.