The shiny Google Chrome

Another big day in web browser history, the day Google finally announced the release of their long waiting and already forgot web browser, Chrome, shortly after they renewed their sponsorship to Firefox for another 3 years.  I couldn’t wait for a second once I heard the release, rushed to their website and had it running on my Vista one minute later.  The first impression, blazing fast; the second, deadly simple; the third, just amazing.  To be honest, never had the same feeling when firstly touching the IE.

What’s good? Google’s legendary simplicity, and the renovated home page layout.  The Chromer team even thought about completely getting rid of the bookmarks but I am glad they didn’t.

What’s cool? The performance. It’s fast, deadly fast.  Thanks to the awesome Webkit, the fastest rendering engine that powers Apple’s Safari. And their own developed JavaScript Virture Machine that really speeds up most of JScript-rich web 2.0 websites.

Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new. “As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they’ll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them,” Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system.

What’s best? The multiprocess architecture that allowed each opened tab run as a separate program.  One tab crash won’t affect other opened tabs, a huge benefit against all other current browsers in the market, which is also the reason that makes drag the tab to a new Window thing in real.  Thanks to their acquisition of Green Border Technologies, a software security firm that developed the “sandboxes” for Chrome.

What’s the killer? Open source.  The source code will be released to public shortly after the release.

But all of these nice killer feature would make me to a switch, not really, at least not now.  Why? Because I am so Firefoxed, can’t leave without the add-on extensions.  That’s the fundamental different between these two browsers.  The add-on extensions used to be the most innovated feature in Firefox, but not any more in Chromers’ eyes, who can’t stand on the fact that any innovation made in browser will be broken without all the updates to the extensions.

The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.