There’s another browser to join the browser war. We had Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari as main stream browsers. Now it’s time to the web titan Google to join the battle of browser. Through my previous posts, I already claimed that, I’m a hard fan of Firefox Browser and of course Google Services like Gmail, Google Reader, and Calendar etc. I curiously look to every Google Products. How they’re starting, how they’re growing, how they’re integrating to user’s internet life. Some services are utter flops like Google Answers

Anyway Google has joined the browser war by releasing their early beta yesterday. Till this time I’m satisfied with Firefox. In the beginning I’ve tired of its crashes, memory issue and flash video performance. But the software was getting matured with in upcoming release. The new version of Firefox 3.x has the most modern features for a browser. Till this time the other browsers like Safari, Opera and Internet explorer are behind (IMO). The strength of Firefox is its add-on functionality. Hundreds and thousands of community developers are developing cool Firefox add-ons to extend its usability. Earlier I was using Firefox for tabbed browsing. But it’s more than a tabbed browsing.

Today morning I downloaded and installed the brand-new chrome browser. The official news was first released in the Google Blog. The blog was providing a link to cool comic book created by Scott Mc Cloud, which describes the features and under the hood technologies of Chrome. The browser’s appearance was appealing. It’s really simple and clean. In a single stretch I’ve noticed few things

1 - Google Chrome Window in Windows Vista

1. The browser has a clean and appealing UI. It’s using the similar color combination used in many Google services like Gmail and others.

2. The tabs are incorporated in the title bar itself. So its give more space for the web pages.

3. The tabs are detachable from the tab bar (title bar). But it’s not possible attach it back. The tabs can be attached back to any chrome window.

4. The tab home page is really impressing. It shows, most used websites as thumbnails, recently bookmarked items, recently closed items… etc…

5. On entering something on the address bar, it also search for the titles rather than only searching the web address as Firefox. This feature is also there in IE 8 Beta 2

6. On creating each tab, Chrome creates a new process. It’s similar to Forking in Linux. The advantage is that, the crash with some web pages won’t affect other running pages. Believe me I used to open lot of tabs in my Firefox browser. I can’t think of the number of process my operating system has to manage while I’m browsing

7. There’s no Main menu for the browser. It’s incorporated just near the address bar.

8. The status bar is not there. It will come to the bottom side whenever it loads data from web server and disappear once it complete getting the content. It’s again saving space for the webpage

9. The find bar is streamlined with the address bar on the top and it will be appeared when we press Ctrl+F. The incremental search feature like Firefox is supported in Chrome as well

10. The download bar at the bottom side shows the progress of active downloads and just completed downloaded files.

11. The wait cursor is truly impressing with its nice animation.

12. Application shortcuts are really impressing. We can launch the websites as simple application using Chrome browser. The window will be rendered as a normal application window. It will not be having the title-bar and other theme rendering of chrome. It’s not possible to attach an application window back to the browser window

2- Application Shortcut opened in Chrome

1. The browser support private browsing with incognito window

2. The zoom facility is there (you can use the same key combination of Firefox)

3. Importing bookmarks are painless. You can get your bookmarks from Firefox or IE

4. The tags and shortcuts supported in Firefox browser is supported in Chrome as well.

5. The address bar is acting as the search bar newly introduced in Firefox and IE. Chrome takes the IE6 style of search using the address bar.

6. Quick bookmark feature is available as Firefox 3.x

7. It’s stable so far regardless it’s a first beta

Java script performance

Chrome outperforms the other browsers in the Java script test. Google has its own Java Script test called V8. I just plotted the graph with the score I got with V8 performance test with Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari. The scores were 617, 72, 21 and 26 respectively.

The other test I ran was SunSpider Javascript Benchmark. Again the Chrome won the game. See the result I got after the test. I can’t understand what really happened with Safari. Apple claimed that it’s the best java script performer among the browser community. Anyway this is the final score I got (smaller is better).

You can check the whole result of my test online (click on the links below)

• Chrome Beta

• Firefox 3.0.1 Result

• Internet Explorer Beta 2

• Safari 3.0.4 result

What I felt missing!

1. The Zoom is not really good as Firefox. In Firefox, the whole page can be zoomed with the images. i.e both text and image will be zoomed and we can see the real zoomed version of the webpage. But Chrome only zooms the text and layout size are still being fixed. I believe it’s because they’re using the Webkit rendering engine. Firefox is Gecko powered.

2. Even we’re getting more space in Chrome with reduced menus and all, it’s still missing a full screen option.

3. It’s missing an integrated RSS reader. It’s quite common with all new browsers. It can at least redirect to Google Reader

4. Double clicking on the empty area of tab won’t create a new tab. Since it’s the address-bar, it just restore/maximize the window. We’ve to find the small new tab button there or has to use short cut Ctrl+T

5. The status bar is showing is very short. It can’t display a moderate sized url fully.

6. Can support alternative themes.

7. Firefox users have to suffer without add-ons. Hope Google can start a new community for hosting add-ons for Chrome

8. Even the bookmarking is easy as we do in Firefox, the Chrome still displaying a small window just down the bookmark button. It could be avoided and best to show when pressing the button twice.

9. It misses a good bookmark organizer

10. The download window could be a smaller one.

11. They could have adopt the search style of Safari which is simply stunning

12. The new browsers support different website search like, search with Amazon, Wikipedia etc… in Chrome, we’ve can only have one search engine.

13. Managing tabs with multiple processes saves us from crashing. But each process creates its own memory foot prints and operating system has to allocate a new process for each tabs which is very costly. 

That’s all for now.. Let me conclude. It’s impressed me at first sight and let’s see what’s gonna happen with the final release of the shiny new browser.

PS: Chrome Suffers with its first security flow