TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

I Read A Thirty-Eight Page Comic About Google’s Browser

Google Chrome is based on the notion of turning each tab into a separate instance of your browser, so if one crashes or is busy, it doesn’t have to affect the others. And so you can see which ones are hogging memory, CPU or bandwidth. It’s also about running JavaScript a lot faster, searching within sites by typing their name first, keeping popups within the tab that opened them, using web-pages as apps by getting rid of the browser framing, and surfing privately in a mode that saves no data or history to your PC. It comes out tomorrow.

I don’t think there are a lot of people out there riotously unhappy with Firefox – in fact, less than 20% of them are unhappy enough with IE to bother with Firefox. But this makes a good case that existing browsers can’t fully adapt to the way we’re using the net without a ground-up replumbing.

Whether and when I switch to it will depend on how customisable it gets. The point of Firefox to me is not tabs, stability or security, it’s the Extensions system. Life without Adblock isn’t worth living. I refuse point-blank to register for anything without InFormEnter to reduce the process to mouse-clicks. And I reach for ImageZoom like a myopic fumbles for their specs.

Impressions: it is blue and fast.

Here’s how fast:

It is fast enough that it loads pages with ads faster than Firefox loads them without ads, and I think that may be the point. And I have just spotted that its spellchecker considers “Firefox” to be an error. Yes, friends, this is the first James post written from Google’s browser. Update: its spellchecker also considers ‘Google’ and ‘spellchecker’ to be errors.

It’s possible it won’t ever be designed for extensions the way Firefox is, because something like Adblock becoming mainstream is probably the single biggest threat to Google’s business. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google would rather Firefox never overtook Internet Explorer.

Other things that may be The Point:

The most striking visual eccentricity of Chrome is that it has no title bar, it rejects Windows convention, monopolises your entire screen, and refuses to label itself as a mere application. Apparently the computers in the Googleplex lobby are running Chrome alone: no start bar or trace of an operating system beneath it.

They may have little or no interest in becoming the de facto browser. Firefox loyalists in the comments here – and Mozilla themselves – are smug in the knowledge that Firefox will eventually do anything Chrome can do that’s worth doing. Google have a huge vested interest in raising the general speed at which browsers can run applications: if Internet Explorer defends its user base by becoming fast enough to support a more powerful version of Google Docs, Google win yet again.

Something that is probably not The Point:

Every few minutes, Google Chrome grinds my PC to a halt for a few seconds, then lets it run for a few seconds, then grinds it to a halt again. Chrome Task Manager insists no part of it is using any CPU at all, but Windows Task Manager shows one Chrome process hogging 25-50% of my CPU during the chugging. Thing has a way to go.