So I downloaded Chrome at work today and ranted and raved with the other programmers about the beast.

Here's a conclusion of our very first impressions, which aren't complete but gives a good idea what life with Chrome will be like. It's a bit mixed, and yes, I know some low points will get better very soon:

The Good:

Multithreaded. I was surprised to see FireFox 3 didn't even have this ability.

Built-in process manager. Ad banner slowing down loading? Kill the thread right from the browser.

Cool drag-and-drop tabbing.

Simplistic GUI, which is mostly a good thing, but mimics IE. Personally I prefer toolbars over the popup menu style menus.

Luckely, it doesn't render fonts quite like other WebKit browsers, so it doesn't need the god-awful font work-around required in Safari. They also didn't render form elements the same as Safari.

It has a firebug-style debugger installed by default. Although, it isn't nearly as good as firebug yet.

It has a powerful and open-ended plugin framework like FireFox.

Many UI features to make browsing easier, and supports almost all of the great UI features of FireFox.

Microsoft was touting its amazing privacy browsing mode that nobody else had. Now somebody has it. You know porn is intermingled into our society too much when browsers begin having this by default ;)

It has amazing goat teleporting capabilities. Look for it ;D

"Aw snap :(" 'Nuff said.

The Bad:

You can't seriously use this browser for anything until it's had the living crap hacked out of it. It also will take a while before a good amount of extensions are developed for it.

It will take forever for everybody to find all the quirks in it.

Because it uses WebKit, it still doesn't properly zoom. FireFox 3 does, and I don't get why nobody else does. It's a freaking no-brainer.

Just another damn slightly-off Mozilla-esque browser to develop for, just like Opera and Safari, that a ton of people will download and make us worry about 3 top browsers instead of 2. On top of 3 completely different Internet Explorers.

It's loads much slower than FireFox 3, which is blazing fast.

The Ugly:

Safari. God. Damnit. Why?? Because they want to use the browser on Android, and they want iPhone compatible websites to show up on Android without developers having to make changes. So they went with WebKit: Safari's POS browser framework that uses JavaScriptCore which makes wonderful AJAX and XML technologies impossible. Yes, it's worse than IE. On the plus side, it looks like they didn't use it to pretty it up like Apple did, which also broke things. Thank you Steve Jobs, for ruining the next great browser experience. Again.

Now, I did hear Google built their javascript engine from the ground up. But I'm assuming that means faster javascript; not more compatible javascript.


/i_hate_apple