Thoughts on Chrome "Beta"

I don't boot into Windows very often, but had to this morning and felt it would be worthwhile to test out Google's new Chrome Browser.

Great Features of Chrome

The speed of page rendering, JavaScript, and tab opening/closing are all great. Kudos to Google on that one.

They provide a lot of the great features that Firefox popularized like a tabbed interface. Providing separate processes per tab is something that many people may not care about very often, but once you have a single bad web page crash a whole browser...your friendly geek will remind you "Try Chrome - it doesn't have that problem."

Chrome also makes one big change: the tabs are above the URL bar which generally does make sense to me: both because inserting the tabs into the area normally reserved for titles is a great space saver but also because the URL bar and back/forward is attached to the page instead of floating above the tab and switching randomly.

And now some dislikes about Chrome

This seems like a bad idea, though, because it fixes a problem that nobody has (logical disconnect between the URL bar above the tab) and also means that if I have lots of tabs open I can't read the full title of the page.

Look at the tabs in this image. What is that tutorial about? Which GMail search is that? Bay Area Drupal...what?

Another problem relates to the "Anchor" in a page like this url if you were logged into the site that should take you to the new comments on the post. It doesn't. I tried a fix that normally works for IE and Firefox which is to move the mouse focus to the URL bar and hit enter. IE and Firefox will both move you to that anchor without refreshing the page - why refresh a local redirection? - but Chrome actually refreshed the whole page which loses the indication of "new" on comments.

Summary

I feel Chrome will be good for the internet as a whole. Browser diversity and competition helps make sure that no single company can control the future of the internet so that we will all continue to benefit from it (and I define "we" as both a consumer and developer of websites). Google's enormous traffic and marketing power should allow it to make rapid inroads stealing users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 which represent the past, present, and future nightmares for web developers and security professionals.

Now...the real question is when will I get a version to use when I boot back into Linux.