Today Google released their brand new Open Source browser called Chrome. I have downloaded it and used it for about an hour now and my first impression is great.
The install was smooth with few clicks and it imported my settings - browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox.
It’s sleek, quick and with useful features that are not immediately obvious but noticable as you start using it. It’s easy to use and feels intuitive.
Since I have only used it briefly at the time of writing this I can’t cover all features in depth, but I would like to highlight some of the things I think is worth mentioning and show some screenshots.
A unique feature is the incognito window.
“Pages that you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.”
View source, okey all browsers have it. Good points are that it shows line numbers, has incremental search with number of matches and has syntax highlighting.
JavaScript debugger
JavaScript Console. It’s an auto-complete/intellisense JavaScript console where you can see all styles and JavaScript objects that makes up the page. It’s easy to see what functions are available for a specific JavaScript represenation of an HTML element.
A Task Manager. Each tab uses its own process and with the task manager you can see how much memory, CPU and Network resources each tab uses. Notice the link at the bottom left saying “Stats for nerds”. Clicking that opens a page with a more detailed view of the memory consumption.
If you want to know more, the philosophy and ideas behind the software I highly recommend you to read this “cartoon”. It’s really cleverly made and interesting from a developer’s point of view.
As a Firefox user the only thing I immediately miss in Chrome is my Firefox extensions. I’m looking forward to see what possibilities Gears have to offer in terms of extending the browser.
At the moment Chrome is only available on Windows. I don’t know when it will become available for other platforms but I hope it is soon.
Deepak
