Surprised no-one has mentioned this yet. It's avaliable to download here and looks pretty impressive, some people are also saying it may be the next step in Google's challenge to Windows as an alternative operating system.

It will be interesting to see where it ranks in comparison to IE and Firefox too although eroding IE's share of the browsing market would be difficult you'd imagine when the majority of us are still using Windows. (With IE included offcourse.)

Just downloaded it today and it seems pretty decent. I like how simple it is

Very simple layout. Very sturdy feel to it as well.

Just playing around with it for now, in fact I'm posting this with it, and it certainly handles well.

Not sure of the chrome it uses, a sort of faux Vista even when on XP, and the status bar isn't present either which I don't like. It's got a very minimalist layout.

It is quite fun for the geek though, with the inclusion of the Inspector Dialog, which has a DOM inspector, js console and js debugger, plus a rather nifty process dialog.

The whole thing lacks "jazz" though, which makes me think it's more about getting a browser that can handle web apps and sit on commercial desktops, taking the place of IE, than pitching for the home desktop user. I dare say it'll pick up some fans there too, as the more I use it the more I like it.

There is no dedicated AdBlock and that needs to be introduced, and a decent js debugger needs to be available if Google want this to be a developer's tool. However as Chrome is based on WebKit (the underpinning of Safari) it's not going to be too difficult to get plugins like that ported over.

I've not even scratched the surface of the VM js engine, as it promises a lot if you believe the hype. An enhanced JS sounds just the ticket.

D/loaded it, looked quite nice, but now Firefox won't work at all.

Why wont it work?

"my google what a nice browser you have!"

"all the better to see you with my dear..."

No idea, it kept crashing when I tried to open it. Uninstalled Chrome, restarted the PC, and it was fine again. Muchos weird.

How long before Google Ads get included as default in Chrome?

And could they have used a more ambiguous name than "Chrome"? It's the word already used to describe the actual browser GUI (not the page GUI) as well as being the engine that runs that in Firefox.

There should be no cross over. Chrome is built on Webkit (the core of the Safari browser), they use different dll's, use different caching and program locations, and I've had them running side by side on my pc for comparison. Really can't understand why the problem you had arose.

Aye, it's a strange one. Did you import all your settings from Firefox when you ran Chrome? I did that, and I'm wondering if that's caused the crash. It has to be something to do with Chrome as Firefox worked perfectly again after I un-installed Chrome.

No, I didn't import, but it needs to FF to be closed for that to happen.

FF did stall once or twice while chrome is running (ie: it showed up as a process but the GUI didn't appear), but that's not unusual for FF.

Yeh, it was closed when I imported the settings, bookmarks, etc.

I'll try d/loading again tonight, as Chrome looked like a browser I could use on a regular basis, very quick too. Firefox is much slower since the move to Version 3 (and it still doesnt support fasterfox)

Yeh it seems fast enough and lightweight enough to be quite a few people's favourites. For me, it still needs development tools for me to take it seriously.

One thing I don't think you will ever see on a Google browser is an ad-blocker - not until they've embedded Adsense into it anyway

I might give this new kid on the block a spin. I assume P&B loads well on it

Because Chrome is based on webkit, there is no way to stop an adblocker being released for it. In fact if you could be bothered you can download the mix of C and C++ source code, take AdBlock from the FF extension, and build the JS straight in.

In fact I was speaking to a guy the other day that was already doing that.




Further comments on Chrome..

Now I've used it in anger there are a few things that are really beginning to bug me. For a start the browser's chrome (yes the Chrome chrome). It's some sort of bespoke hybrid of *nix and vista styles, but it's not built using the MS GUI API, this means it doesn't respond in the same way as every other application does. That's really silly, making it less intuitive and for some making it harder to take as a serious product.

The "web application" creation thingy. The window it creates them in is flawed. It doesn't have an address bar so it's immediately open to phishing, and it lacks any navigation controls, even reload is hidden away.

Chrome becomes as slow as FF when dealing with multiple tabs. I can have as many as 30-40 tabs open on my FF session and while Chrome copes admirably with each of them, the whole browser process slows down due to them. So while on first glance Chrome looks every bit better than FF, actually using it in anger brings up problems that FF have solved long ago.

How?!!!

Because I'm the one.

I read today that they had to change the licence agreement that goes with it, as yesterday the licence said that Google held all the rights to anything you wrote, posted or created in the browser

If you use GMail, you will see that they have rights over the content you are sent and you send yourself, but that's only in the context of the GMail app. Basically it's there to stop people saying "hey, you're checking out my email" and to allow Google to say, "no we don't read it, just scan it for keywords and offer up relevant advertising feeds".

The same will happen with the browser. Advertising will slowly be brought in. It will be contextually based on what you surf and in turn will be outwith the actual webpage.

That's nothing new of course. Opera sponsored ads in their chrome for many years, until it realised nobody likes adverts (in fact FF's success is primarly down to the many ways it has of stopping adverts).

oh, and has anyone else spotted the GoogleUpdater process running in the background?

Why does a browser need that? You only need to check for updates when you run the thing, not 24/7, and interestingly you can't update the browser from within itself.

Very poor design.

When you least expect it you'll probably get swamped with messages like "We notice you don't have Picassa/Google Earth/Google Apps/Gmail/Google Toolbar/Google Desktop/Adsense/Googles operating system... Please choose one of the following options: Download | Cancel (which is really the download button in a different position on the window)"

Call me cynical, but I can't see me ever wanting to use Chrome.

No problem with that attitude, as I have it too. However the js engine does work better in the VM they have it in, and it's already better than IE and it's still just a beta.

btw, try this in the url: about:internets

I'm using it, very impressed. Firefox too often ground to a halt with multiple tabs/embedded applications running. Everything is running very smoothly with this multi-threaded browser so far....

Technically FF is multi-threaded too, in fact all tabbed browsers are.

Things like that bring a smile to my face, like typing weapons of mass destruction into google and click I'm feeling lucky while that still worked.

I like the most visited thumbnails when you open a new tab, a nice twist on Opera "Speed Dial"

Also, just noticed that when you start typing in the bar it has a search list. At first, I thought it was the same as Operas and FF3's where they search through your history. In fact, it appears to be searching on google direct. I quite like that.

Not according to the task manager/processes screen. Only 1 instance of FF there.

One of the few things you can turn on and off from the options.


Depends on what level you are going to discuss it on. They could be considered multi-threaded applications as each browser window is a separate object within the application, but obviously at the process level of windows, it's seen as a single process. IE, with it's incestuous relationship with the core Windows APIs could also be considered multi-threading as it will use other processes running in the background.

Google have gone another step in their bid for world domination by launching their own browser, Google Chrome.

Anyone tried it out? Two features I do like include incognito (enables you to browse without leaving a trace) and the in built spell checker (interestingly, Google comes up as misspelled).

http://www.pieandbovril.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=91091

It scores well on the Acid3 compliancy test - round about the high 70s mark. IE6 gets, well, 6, lol. IE7 isn't much better. FF gets low 70s.

I think development builds of Safari, Opera and Air have all achieved 100s in the last few months.

Chrome is just the webkit, so it should (should) render the same Acid test as Safari.



There are several interesting things I've learnt about Chrome.

One of them is the timeouts/intervals in JS. For anyone who doesn't know these are used to handle one off or repetitive tasks that can be called asynchronously (although JS being a single thread language, it doesn't run asynchronously). The format of the command is ..

setInterval( func, time ); or setInterval( func, time );

.. the time parameter is based on milliseconds, but with JS any timing is dependent on the machine it's running on. This tends to leave browsers putting a lower cap level on it, so you find that setting the time to 1-15 has no real difference (not that you would notice it as it's 100th of a second). Chrome however runs it's JS in a virtual machine allowing it to control the timing better. In fact the coders have even said they intend to set it correctly regardless of the actual machine it's running on.

None of that sounds particularly bad until you realise how often setInterval/Timeout are used as a hacky solution to a problem. In fact I've used it to deal with preloading scripts using JS because IE's onload even is buggered on the <script> tag. You will find a lot of sites that will fail in Chrome because they've used a js technique they didn't understand.

Chrome also doesn't respect mime types either I notice. Justin.tv had a problem with serving SWF (flash) objects, returning them direct without a proper mime type. No browser could view the file (IE, FF, Op) and would simply try and download the file. Chrome, however, played it meaning it doesn't actually check the mime type before parsing the file.

The numbers/results I saw were on current development builds for Safari and Air and for the Chrome beta that was released a couple of weeks back.

The current (release) version of Safari is slightly lower than the Chrome beta - this may be due to the differences in the JavaScript engines; Safari using JavaScriptCore and Chrome V8. Other than V8 compiling the code and having faster 'pure' JavaScript, but slower DOM manipulation, I'm not sure what the differences are between them (DOM, CSS and ECMA standard handling-wise).

The next version of Safari uses an enhanced version of JavaScriptCore/SquirrelFish, so it should be interesting to see how that works.

Is this thread now ?

Probably, but seeing as this is the E-Chat forum, is that a bad thing?


It will be interesting to see what happens when Chrome gets ported to OSX considering it is so close to Safari.

This is quite interesting reading, if a little short on actual substance..

http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/09/plat...priorities.html