Going Chrome

Like the rest of the ner­dos­phere I’ve been giv­ing Google’s new browser Chrome a try. For the record, I’m run­ning Chrome on my Windows XP lap­top at work; I’m not about to run a VM ses­sion just to test it out on the iMac at home. My ini­tial reac­tion? I think Chrome presents some inter­est­ing ideas, but it’s prob­a­bly not going to be my default XP browser, and almost cer­tainly won’t be my default browser in OS X. Details after the fold.

The Good:

There are a few things that I really like in Chrome.

Separate Process Per Tab:

This is a won­der­ful idea. We’ve all expe­ri­enced the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing one tab crash an entire ses­sion worth of work; or, at the very least, bog down the entire browser to the point of un-usability. Most mod­ern browsers attempt to ame­lio­rate this by offer­ing some sort of “resume last ses­sion” func­tion­al­ity; but many mod­ern AJAX based web apps make this func­tion­al­ity less than useful.

The Omnibar:

So far, I pre­fer the behav­iour of the Omnibar to FireFox 3’s “Awesomebar.” Although, I admit that I’m not exactly a heavy FireFox user. Regardless, inte­grat­ing search, his­tory, book­marks and url nav­i­ga­tion is a bril­liant idea.

Pared Down User Interface:

To an extent (see below), I’m lik­ing the more light­weight interface.

 

The Bad:

Sadly, there is also much that I don’t care for in Chrome.

 

Asstastic Bookmark Management:

Bookmark man­age­ment is essen­tially non-existent. I think that NCSA Mosaic had a bet­ter inter­face for man­ag­ing book­marks. I’m sure the thought in Googletown is that peo­ple will just use the “star” but­ton to dump their book­marks into a soup (the first idiot that calls it a “cloud” gets punched in the junk) and use the Omnibar to search them out later. Sorry, that doesn’t cut it for me. I use hier­ar­chi­cal book­marks to help me orga­nize future lines of inquiry; if I have to search for a term then the process has failed me. As an aside, try click­ing the star but­ton to, say, bring up the edit book­marks func­tion and not add a book­mark. It’s not at all intuitive.

Overly Simplistic Interface:

This is the flip side to the point above. I applaud the Chrome team for hav­ing the balls to rad­i­cally re-think the browser inter­face. Unfortunately, I think that they went too far. A good inter­face should be dis­cov­er­able and Chrome’s inter­face is far from that. Another point of annoy­ance on the inter­face front is the Options dia­log. After you pull up said dia­log you get three tabs, “Basics,” “Minor Tweaks” and “Under the Hood.” That’s what I like from a browser, condescension.

I think it’s fairly obvi­ous that the Chrome team had rich Internet appli­ca­tions in mind when “re-thinking” the browser inter­face. Applications that pro­vide a large mea­sure of the fea­tures that are either miss­ing or buried in Chrome’s inter­face via their own. Unfortunately, at least in my usage, such appli­ca­tions are the minor­ity of my browser usage.

Lack of Integration With OS Services:

This is a pro­vi­sional point, as Windows XP pro­vides pre­cious lit­tle in the way of OS wide ser­vices for the browser to inte­grate with; but let’s just say that if Chrome on OS X doesn’t inte­grate with Keychain, the sys­tem wide spell checker and Sync Services, it will be a non-starter for me.

The bot­tom line is that, Chrome pro­vides some inter­est­ing new takes on the web browser; and I hope Safari 4 steals those ideas and runs with them.