What do you think of Google creating a browser? (Chrome)

Well since it sounds like they’ll be releasing the source to everything and that it would appear that they’ll be contributing back to WebKit and Firefox I can’t see it as anything but good. I feel that software is very much an evolutionary process so the more diversity the better: all the good stuff will rise to the top (naturally selected) and everyone should benefit. Of course this is all so long as the software is free or at the very least open source.

Also, the whole V8 JavaScript optimization stuff sounds very cool (the hidden class stuff).

@paulc – indeed, I’ve just been reading that comic and V8 sounds cool indeed. I won’t really use it (probably), but if they make up for the good intentions they voice there, I’d love it.

I’m wondering how long they’ve been working on it…

oooh I didn’t know about this. Thanks for asking this question Vincentt! I am very excited about playing w/ the browser tomorrow (all things Google manage to excite me) and will report back here once that’s done.

Also, I can’t believe they created a comic for this…does that happen often? For anyone wanting to read the 40 page comic, you can go here

I dont care what it is, if Google had a part in it, its fucking awesome.

@PnL – I can’t recall anybody doing something like that, but hey, it’s Google :P

I’ve read it, there are even some funny parts in it. I don’t see myself using the browser though.

@paulc, I would point to Internet Explorer’s 75% marketshare to disprove the claim that software is evolutionary. Perhaps it could be, if it were free of monopoloistic software-pushing. :( I’m afraid that IE will stay exactly where it is, and Google and Mozilla will split the other 25%. I hope I’m proved wrong.

chrome’s screenshots are out.

@tonedef, market share does not equal evolution in software. Software can evolve without gaining or losing market share (or even paying any mind to it). All evolution requires is that positive traits bubble up and negative traits get deprecated. As an example here, Google is using WebKit which is a “good trait” thus bubbling it up. They are adding in a rather different security model which is a new trait. If it turns out to work I guarantee that this will bubble up in other projects. Perhaps the market drives some of the decisions but sometimes just solid craftsmanship can too.

Chrome is out at http://www.google.com/chrome/

This beta is just Windows unfortunately, you can’t even download it on Linux without workarounds. Which I did, but it doesn’t run in Wine :(

I’ve had some people try it on Windows, and it appears to crash a lot for them.

I am playing around with it right now, but I can’t decide if I want to keep it. I don’t see the “special/different” factor yet (comparing to Firefox3). Does anyone else?

By now I’ve read reports of it being amazingly fast. We couldn’t notice at my brother’s computer, but that’s slow as hell normally too.

@Vincentt, we tried it out here through Parallels and yes, it ran very fast but basically just as fast as Safari when you disable its page loading delay. It did get very choppy when we put a bunch of tabs up with some CPU intensive plugins. What was really cool was the profiling window which shows each tab (and sub pieces), its CPU usage and memory usage. I’m sure its got a somewhat long way to go before its as stable as other browsers.

If it were available for Macs to test I might give it a shot. But it’s not, so I won’t.

First and last time ill ever say this, I wish i had windows on my laptop instead of linux. Whens it supposed to launch.?

uber – it has already launched for windows. do you mean when will it launch for other OS-es?

yea, i want to get my hands on it.

I’m going to be the first to say that in the first hour of playing around with it I immediately decided to replace Firefox with it.
I’m not sure why I like it so much. Could be the yummy clean interface, the slightly faster startup and running speed, or the new features such as the “omnibox”.
I guess it has a lot of design tweaks that seem small, but make a huge difference when all pulled together. Feels like a lot less “wrestling” with the browser to do what I want in a quick and efficient manner.

Unfortunately… I’m only running chrome when I boot up VMware on my mac. Can’t wait for the mac version to be released!

PS: I noticed when reading Google’s comic book that on page 27, there’s a drawing of a a sandbox. Inside the sandbox is a toy ball that looks very familiar.

I don’t know if I could replace Firefox with it because I like my Firefox add ons too much. Does anyone know if Chrome has some sort of replacement for add-ons?

Mac users can get email notification for when chrome for mac is out by submitting your email here It doesn’t look like it will be out till the end of this year though.

@PnL – actually, it hasn’t really launched for Windows yet. Google’s just released a beta ;-)

It’s probably going to take a while for it to be launched, but I don’t think it will take as long for it to be available for other platforms (at least not for Linux) since it’s open source and Google seems to be playing it open as well (as opposed to just “dumping the code online”).

@chroma – hmm… A “clean interface” can easily be achieved with Firefox, though of course it looks differently, so you might like Chrome’s looks better (there’ll probably soon be a Chrome-skin for Firefox though ;-). The “omnibox” seems similar to Firefox’s “Awesomebar” – is it better or worse in any way?

After just 30 minutes of testing it, it’s already frozen 3 times. And no, it’s not my computer, IE, Firefox, and Safari all run perfectly fine. I guess it’s just the Beta version. I’d like to see how it turns out when the full/completed version comes out.

@MRMontpetit out of curiousity, what are your computers’ specs?

And has anyone else had problems with Chrome crashing like MrMontpetit describes? I haven’t had one crash and I’m running it in VMware. Yet MrMont is getting a crash every 10 minutes.

I guess I over exaggerated. It’s more like once every 30 mins :P Usually when I’m running multiple tabs, then load something large in one of the tabs, the whole thing freezes, I thought tabs counted as separate windows on Chrome?