The One With Aldacron

Google has entered the web browser arena with Chrome, a browser based on the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari. Never a fan of Microsoft’s IE, I’ve been a diehard Firefox user for a few years. I did use Opera for a short while, but there’s something about it I never quite liked. It’s an aesthetic thing, I guess. I tried Safari shortly after it was made available on Windows, but it didn’t impress me much. What I’m saying here is that it would take a lot to get me to ditch Firefox.

So I downloaded Chrome today. I can say that after five minutes of using it I was hooked. It’s fast. Really, really fast. It does a lot of things differently than other browsers. For one, the ubiquitous search bar is no more, being integrated with the address bar. The default search engine is, of course, Google, but you can configure others. Typing anything in the bar will give you hints for both addresses and search terms. Tabs are handled differently as well. In other browsers, the tabs are run in a single process, but in Chrome each tab is run as a separate process (see this page if you don’t know what a computer process is).

Chrome also sports a blazingly fast JavaScript engine. If you use a lot of JavaScript-intensive web pages you should see a noticeable performance boost over other browsers. If all browsers on the market incorporate this kind of JavaScript engine, we should expect to see some innovative JavaScript applications appearing.

One minor feature that pleasantly surprised me was how it handled importing bookmarks from Firefox. It’s not uncommon for a browser to be able to import bookmarks from othe browsers. Chrome asked to import my Firefox bookmarks during installation. What surprised me, though, was that it recognized my bookmark keywords. Firefox allows you to set a keyword on a bookmark. Then, rather than going to the bookmark menu you can type the keyword in the address bar and press enter. Firefox will find the bookmark associated with the keyword and load that page. I have keywords, usually two or three letters, for the sites I visit most frequently. Chrome recognizes them and lists the site associated with the keyword at the top of the list of suggested sites and search terms (Firefox doesn’t actually list the site with the suggestions). Cool

Another big feature is called ‘incognito browsing’. From the menu, you can open a new ‘incognito window’. Any site you visit in that window will not be recorded in the browser history and all cookies saved during that session will be deleted when the incognito window is closed. It’s about time a browser did something like this!

What I’m missing from Chrome are the plugins I frequently use in Firefox, such as ScribeFire (which I’m using right now for this post), PDF Download, FlashGot and StumbleUpon. I haven’t tried to download anything from Chrome yet, so I don’t know how it measures up to the download manager I use through FlashGot. That may be the thing I end up missing the most.

In the end, Chrome has supplanted Firefox as my default browser on Windows. Color me impressed.