Chrome Falls Short
I'm going to be controversial and go ahead and say I'm not at all impressed by Google's new browser.
Yes yes, I know, I'm sure that the dev team are sobbing as they read this. But they should have tried harder, even if this is a beta. Take their security model, for example. I'm very wary about installing firefox add-ons - it's potentially worse than installing a keylogger, or having my router compromised. What I want to see in my browser is a better security model for third party add-ons, and a proper sandbox that blocks plugins from getting through to my desktop and affecting anything on my system outside the browser. It's absurd that while the biggest risk these days are browser and plugin exploits, nobody is really doing anything about it; I'm at the point where I'm almost scared to browse on the same machine I do my online banking. Chrome's sandboxing is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go nearly far enough - or even seem to work.
There are few interesting features, and most of those are borrowed from other projects; its sandboxing security model is flawed; I wrote a solution to persist cookies across its privacy mode in less than 10 minutes; even its fancy new javascript engine is outperformed by the new firefox engine, at least under certain conditions. And what is up with it thrashing my cpu and hard drive for several minutes after starting up? Right now, it's just not a particularly good browser.
Bottom line is it's too inconvenient for people to switch to from IE, it lacks the features that people are used to in Firefox, so in its current state it'll struggle against Opera and Safari. And yet we'll have to support it. Curse you, Google - the last thing we need is yet another browser to test in and develop for. It's all very well saying standards-based sites will be fine, but it still does things differently.
Beta or not, this had the potential to be better, and it's a shame it hasn't been realised.
Comments
People need to realise that they don't have to develop for every single browser - but develop for a standard, doing markup and suggestions to browsers as to how things could look - but ultimately let it be up the browsers how to present things. That, or go back to having your webpages be on big image-map ... ;-)
I've done it myself, plenty of times, but in the end it's really not a viable solution. You used to be certain that people would at least use 800x600 - now not even that is a given, with all the mobile devices around.
In my very un-humble opinion, the only way forward is to accept that HTML and CSS are to be seen as information to the browser on the structure and "serving suggestions" of a webpage, and hope that the freedom this way given to the browser developers will make them do something nice with.
... otherwise, I like your blog post. I haven't tried Chrome yet, because they said it'd be beta, and I don't really need a beta web-browser. The javascript engine is made across the road from where I work, by some quite talented people, and I think that given time, it'll be able to do far better than the firefox engine. Might even take over the job, since it's free software anyway. ;-)
This point is mentioned in [[http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/|this article defending Chrome]], and I entirely agree that you should develop for a standard and leave it up to the browsers to present things correctly - but a lot of the time, you can't.
At the moment I'm working on a perfectly valid page and CSS stylesheet that is broken in IE6 because of the 3px bug. 60% of the visitors to that site use IE6, including the client. Saying to them that "no, the site's not broken, it's just your browser" isn't a solution, it's the easiest way to lose the client; I've got to fix it.
The other problem is how the browser manages plugins. I can write entirely valid code, but unless I go through and test it in all of the browsers, I miss the fact that IE6 and IE7 break Flash's ExternalInterface if the Flash is in an iframe smaller than 18x18. And if 80% of those visitors are using IE6 and IE7, I have to fix it.
Although I always design for the standard first, I've got to go through, check and fix at least IE5, IE6, IE7 and IE8b2, Firefox 2 and 3, Opera, and Safari 3. Clients don't understand or care about standards, they just want it to work and look good. Chrome's ~3% market share is already dropping, but unless it drops further, I'll have to add it to list.
The javascript engine does look good though - the comparison was done by the firefox dev team (link added to article), so it definitely has to be taken with a pinch of salt ;)
This is the thing though, I'm not convinced that Google made Chrome to be a good everyday browser. They made it to make a point, and I think it's more successful at doing that than being an actual everyday browser.
Browser innovation has stagnated a bit in the past year. Sure, we had Firefox 3, but people seem to be having a bit of a love/hate relationship with that. It brought the awesomebar, but there was a sense that people were expecting more. Microsoft doesn't seem to be doing much with IE other than copying everyone else. Opera had the speed-dial thing invented, but apart from that haven't come up with much (I don't think). I can see how Google may have become a bit exasperated with the lack of progress being made in browser development because, in a sense, it holds back their business. Chrome seems to be a browser that introduces new ways of doing things, rather than being a polished v1.0 product.
Personally, I'm hoping that this makes Firefox better. I'm sure the Opera users are hoping that this helps make Opera better, and the IE users are hoping this makes IE better.
As a way of injecting life into the browser market, this might be a good step. Maybe Google will continue to maintain Chrome as the ideas-and-innovation browser which you'll never use, but look towards to see what the next great features will be. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
You may be right - it makes more sense as a channel to push ideas into other browsers, at least at this point. But this is Google, wouldn't put anything past them. Think we'll just have to wait and see.
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