First Look - We have had a chance to have a thorough look at Google’s new Chrome and run the browser to range of usability tests. Our initial conclusion is that the Chrome beta reveals a much more ergonomic and useful browser than what the available versions of today's established browsers can offer. Yes, it is very rough around the edges, but we are officially impressed with what we've seen so far. Here are our top five observations of features we believe are proof that Chrome is here to stay.
People say that the first impression often is key to make you love or hate a product. In the case of Chrome, it took only a few minutes to convince me that Google’s latest product is an amazing browser and a new type of browser that takes this software category to the next level. At first sight, Chrome may look like it has bypassed all graphic designers, but it is very consistent with all other Google software in a way you would expect it to look and feel – in a similar way how you expect Apple software to look and how you expect Microsoft software to feel.
In Chrome’s case, the GUI is extremely thin and lightweight. Instead of showing shiny buttons, it is focused on usability and speed. Performance, search and browsing are its top three unique selling points that leave any other browser in the dust at this time.
Most importantly, Chrome impressed me with its responsiveness when dozens of tabs were loaded at once. When a site crashes, you simply close a tab to kill all associated processes and reclaim the occupied memory without fragmentation. This is possible because Google actually developed a cloud operating system of its own that just happens to accommodate a browser as well. I am convinced that Chrome is a big step towards what may evolve into an operating system from Google aimed at thin clients.
A fresh user interface
Google user interfaces take time getting used to. Remember the first time you saw Google Search and compared it to Yahoo? It felt a bit empty to me. You may have the same impression with Chrome. A simple, uncluttered user interface gets - a trademark of Google product design – can take you quickly to the feature you need – once you are familiar with Chrome’s workflow and a few shortcuts. The main window is slightly rounded with the standard minimize, maximize and close buttons. There's no window title, no icons or menu bar to obscure your view. Tabs sit on top followed by the toolbar below - that's it. A light blue window background frames the browsing area, tabs and the toolbar.
Consider the UI the opposite extreme of IE8, which occasionally feels overloaded and may overwhelm some users. Chrome is reduced to the minimum, which can speed up your daily browsing tasks. On the downside, you will have to explore the deeper feature set and learn some shortcuts to reveal Chrome’s productivity potential.
Dynamic tabs
Chrome nails the task of window and tab management with useful keyboard shortcuts that simplify navigation patterns. Drag a tab to a new slot and others get out of the way smoothly. Close a few tabs and the remaining extend to the width of your entire after a brief pause – there’s a bit of Apple design philosophy in this feature. You can drag a tab out of the Chrome window (it will turn into a large site thumbnail) onto your desktop to create a new window. You can move tabs between windows effortlessly, without any slowdown or delay. You can also close all tabs associated with the current tab with a single option.
When you open a new tab, the window will show a grid of nine websites you have visited the most. Unlike Opera, Chrome doesn't let you assign your own set of sites to the nine slots. Boxes with search engines you use the most, links to three recently closed tabs and your most recent bookmarks are placed in a right column. You can also access your full browsing history by choosing a small "Show full history" option at the bottom of the “home” page.
Tabs have become one of most important features within a modern browser and Chrome does a great job handling multiple web pages. There is just one annoying omission that spoils the experience - Tabs shrink to an extremely small width when you open lots of them – which means that you can read the window titles anymore. Google should consider the Firefox solution of a scrolled tabs area. Also, there is no drop down menu to view all your tabs and select the one you want.
I also have to say that I like Microsoft’s idea to create groups of tabs – for example for pages you open from one website into multiple tabs. Microsoft color-codes these tab groups, which, in our opinion, is a must-have feature for a modern browser.
Navigation and search/address bar
The main toolbar with navigation options is positioned below your tabs. It has just seven buttons and the dominant URL box. There are forward and backward arrows reload and go buttons, two buttons that open page and settings menus and a star symbol to bookmark a page. The pictograms on buttons should be recognized by anyone who has used a browser before. In fact, Chrome's toolbar combines the best of Firefox 3 (bookmark star, back/forward buttons) and IE7 (buttons with drop-down menus for page options and settings), but it differs in two important details. There is no home button or search bar.
Eliminating these two input options is one of the “strange” new features that will require you to adjust your browsing behavior. But if your homepage is a search engine anyway, then Chrome has eliminated the need for a home page. Here’s why.
The lack of a home button guiding you to a certain website may be a matter of personal preference. It is one of those original features of a web browser that acts as a door to the web and provides you with a starting point. However, Google was able to eliminate the two input options since the most popular websites are listed right on the front page, effectively giving you multiple start options (a fixed configuration option would be nice) and if you are using Google Search as your home page, you can now use the address bar for your searches - no matter where you are.
When you start typing in the address bar, it will suggest popular sites, searches and pages you already visited that contain your search term. You can choose a suggested item from the drop-down list or simply hit ENTER to send your query to the default search provider (which you can set in Chrome's preferences). You can also use common search operators. Additionally, there is a handy Paste-and-Search option - simply mark a word, right-click and search for the selection. But searches in Chrome are much more intelligent than that.
Other, site-integrated search engines are accessible directly from the address bar in an innovative way. Start typing a search engine's URL or name (for example “YouTube”). If Chrome finds it in its internal search engine list, it auto-completes the address and offers you to hit TAB to select that site’s engine for search (if supported by that site.) Simply enter your search term and hit ENTER to be taken directly to that search engine's results page, in this case YouTube's.
Chrome shines when you want to reach previously visited pages. Just start typing any piece of content you can remember, such as a headline, parts of text, or a combination of words you may remember. Since your search provider has cached all the pages you visited before, Chrome can ping it to bring up the appropriate page based on the partial content you provided. If your search provider is Google, then Google Suggest service will be used to provide auto-suggestions. You can turn off the auto-suggestion in Chrome’s settings.
Save web applications to the desktop
You can create desktop, start menu and quick launch shortcuts to a site to run web applications in their own streamlined window with maximum working space without tabs, bars, menus or an address bar – which may be useful for social networking sites, map or weather services. Simply select the "Create application shortcut" option under the Page button to create shortcut to any site. Chrome even assigns site's icon to the shortcut. The shortcut actually launches a site in Chrome window without UI controls, which creates the look and feel of a desktop application.
If the web application is Gears-enabled, a local copy of your online data will be made so that you can continue to work on your online documents even while offline. Next time you are online, Gears synchronizes the changes with the cloud. Mozilla Prism technology also brings this capability to Firefox, but Gears (formerly known as Google Gears) has been on the market longer and has gained traction with web developers.
Under the hood
Although Chrome uses some components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, Google says it developed Chrome from scratch with no legacy code to limit its creativity. Chrome may look and act like a web browser, but it really is a mini operating system that accommodates a web browser. The browser itself has the highest priority and everything else runs in a sandboxed, protected environment so that Chrome's security can't be easily compromised by malware or misbehaving web applications.
Everything that runs inside tabs operates independently of the browser. Each tab runs in its own protected process so no tab can affect other tabs, freeze Chrome or impact its responsiveness. Every Firefox user who runs a couple dozen tabs at once will appreciate this feature. Although it takes up a bit more memory upfront, Chrome is extremely efficient when multiple tabs are opened. What is most important, it doesn't fragment memory over time as you open and close many tabs. I was surprised how responsive Chrome remains no matter how much I threw at it.
In case something goes wrong, Chrome has its own task manager (Shift + ESC), which is similar to Windows task manager. It enables you to see how much resources each browsing process consumes and enables you to kill those you find inappropriate. The same is achieved when you close a tab. You can even click on an amusing "Stats for nerds" option in task manager to reveal detailed statistics of every process, script and even plug-ins that run in Chrome. If you run multiple browsers, you can see their memory usage as well.
The new V8 scripting engine runs web applications at incredible speed, thanks to the compiler that turns JavaScript programs into executable machine code that runs directly on your computer's processor. Byte-code JavaScript interpreters used in other browsers cannot compete with Chrome's V8 technology at this time.
Useful links
Chrome keyboard shortcuts
How to find search engine URLs
How to manually add, edit or remove your search providers
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