Google Chrome

Benjamin Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Fri Mar 19 11:41:42 EDT 2010


  Someone pointed out to me that Google Chrome has a "beta" release
for Linux now.  (What *isn't* beta at Google?)  I thought it would be
good to stimulate some discussion here.

  They offer .rpm and .deb packages.  The .deb installed easily on my
Debian 5.0 box.  You can download from
<http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html>.

  Chrome is *fast*, I will give it that.  Noticeably faster than
Firefox 3.6 on same box.  Both for startup and processing.  Of course,
it helps that it doesn't have 20 different extensions loaded, but it's
still faster than an "empty" Firefox profile on my box.  If the files
are in the kernel cache, it starts so fast that I actually quit and
checked to see if it was keeping itself running in the background.
(It wasn't.)  Likewise for rendering pages, especially complex markup
or heavy JavaScript.

  The UI is very minimalist.  There's a tab strip, a combination
icon/URL toolbar, and a bookmark toolbar.  One advantage to this is
you have more screen area devoted to the web page.

  No traditional menu bar.  Two drop-down-menus are present, but they
come out of two icons on the toolbar strip.  "File" and "Edit" are
combined into a menu with a "page" icon, and everything else is under
a "wrench" icon.  What would be Firefox's "Bookmarks" menu appears as
"Other Bookmarks" on the right of the bookmarks toolbar.  For a
browser, I suspect this approach makes some sense.  For example, you
can't do much editing, so a separate "Edit" menu wastes space.

  No status bar.  If you hover the mouse pointer over a link,
something like a "tool tip" appears at the bottom of the window.
Status messages about page loading, etc., also appear this way.  It
took a bit of getting used to, but I'm finding I like the additional
page real-estate it gives me.

  Out-of-the-box, features are also minimalist.  I think that's the
right approach.  Functionality should be modular, with extensions.  If
Google decides they want to load it up with features out-of-the-box,
then I would say said features should be implemented as pre-packaged
extensions, which could then be removed if you don't use them.  This
is what Firefox started out as, but they got somewhat away from the
modular approach, unfortunately.

  Unfortunately, useful extensions are somewhat limited right now.

  I can't simply can't survive long without TreeStyleTabs.
(Hierarchal tab structure.  Don't leave your home page without it.)

  I couldn't find anything like Greasemonkey for user scripts.

  Things like NoScript, ad blockers, and cookie controls are also
rather meager right now.  Apparently Chrome simply doesn't have all
the needed hooks yet.  Some say that's deliberate, because Google
makes most of their money from advertisements and metrics.  I don't
know if I'd chalk it up to deliberate intent, but I could see that
such things might not be the first priority in Google's planning.

  What do others think?

-- Ben


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