Polishing Up the Chrome
Google has their own browser! Yes, you heard me, a new Google browser has hit the streets as a beta 🙂 And what’s more, it seems to be mostly faster and better than the existing crop of stable browsers …
The new browser, named Chrome, has been built from the ground up with the latest web technologies in mind. So, each tab in the browser, as well as every task/process within each tab, is it’s own thread. What this means for most users is that the whole browser does not lock up because one site on one tab has issues or is busy. In fact, in using Chrome, I found this difference to be crucial because the browser performance was super smooth for each and every tab I was working with.
If that wasn’t enough, Chrome also appears to be ahead of the pack with regards to standards support. While most of the existing stable versions of browsers aren’t doing so well on the Acid3 test, (and no, don’t bring up the browsers that do pass the test :p), Chrome appears to score about 79 out of 100 on the Acid3 test whereas the latest FireFox (3.0.1) manages only about 71 out of 100. And that’s better than how IE fares 😀
Of course, there’s one thing funny with the how Chrome handles the Acid3 test, it seems to take longer and the score isn’t always the same – it’s almost as if the test was created for single-threaded browsers and the multi-threaded nature of Chrome throws the test off somehow …
Additionally, Chrome imports bookmarks, site passwords, browsing history, and a host of other information from FireFox and so, if you use FireFox, once you start using Chrome, it’s almost as if you’ve not changed browsers at all. All your previous settings and browsing history is all intact.
I won’t go into all the other great features of Chrome, especially the address bar which does FireFox‘s nifty new address bar one better, but the one thing I do miss is the ability to extend the browser using extensions, as is possible with FireFox. I haven’t checked yet to see if Chrome supports extensions/plugins but I sure do hope it does …
Already got it downloaded. And I have to say its quite fantastic. Much better then firefox 3. Firefox 3 fast and all, but it screwed up my internet. So much so, that I had to uninstall it and had my friend send me the install file for firefox 2 (because it also destroyed Internet Explorer).
I have to agree 🙂 FireFox 3 was my favourite browser till Chrome came along and now I’m torn – Chrome is fantastic but I find some of the FireFox extensions (especially FireBug) extremely useful. But I think I’m probably going to switch to Chrome for day-to-day use, at least for the time being …
I am using firefox now, but I will try Chrome as soon as I can. It sounds wonderful because I am using only one program a day, and it is firefox. Don’t you think Google will extend Chrome with the ability of using plugins? But already it sounds so great!
Chrome is certainly much better at error recovery and is faster than FireFox. I do hope that Google adds some sort of a extension framework to Chrome in the future but for the moment, I use Chrome for my daily browsing and switch to FireFox for anything which requires my old FireFox extensions 🙂
Your post made me try out Chrome yesterday, and it’s true that it misses a lot, for exemple I miss the spelcheck although some say it is included. But some say they can’t use it when they write a new post in wordpress. How do you solve that issue?
The spellchecking does work for me under Chrome. But it might be because I went and specifically set the spellchecking options. You can do this via Options – Minor Tweaks – Change font and language settings – Languages. The Options menu option is under hte spanner icon on your toolbar, in case you were wondering 🙂
I have noticed my spellcheck works in my html window, but not in my visual window. I guess that is pretty normal.
I don’t usually post via the WP admin interface (I use my own desktop application which posts to WP) and so haven’t noticed the spellchecking at all. But I just checked and it appears that I do have spellchecking in the WP visual editor. Are you using the latest WP? (Not sure that would affect things but just trying to narrow down the possibilities/culprit …)
I am using the latest version indeed, but the spellchecking in my visual tell it doesn’t work.
Well, it’s fine, I’ll check again when they update Chrome.
Thank you