The Chrome experience...

In continuation with my previous article I finally managed to download Chrome and start using it today.
Here is what my first experience with it was ...

First off, I would like to say that sadly I'm still using Firefox to post this, keep reading to see why...

Seeing yesterday's screen shots of the browser made it look kind of simple and plain, but after having used it for some time now I'm really enjoying the amount of screen real-estate that Chrome offers, and the separate URL bar for each tab isn't really a big deal at all, you get used it right away.
Google's done away with the title & Staus bar's and instead the topmost part of the window is the tab itself which looks kinda cool.

The next change you can feel is the speed at which it renders pages. It's blazing fast for the pages it can render (and yeah the separate process per tab is quite true :) you can see that in the TaskManager). The Chrome Task Manager is another great feature that shows you CPU, Network and Memory usage (there is also a "Stats for Nerds" that shows a lot more detail).

Ok, so that was the good part, now for the not so good part...

I wasn't able to open several sites a few of which are Gmail, Google Docs, Blogger (actually pretty much any site that uses my Google id to authenticate), a few bank website's and several pages in my intranet (yeah yeah I know it's beta but still I'd expected at least an error to show up not a blank page).
With Gmail and the Google Docs, I was able to get the login screen initially, but nothing after that and the funny thing is trying to open a new window now does not even give me the login screen (maybe it thinks I still logged in and is unable to display that?). I was using Chrome from behind a proxy that uses proxy server scripts, but I don't think the folks at Goog would have forgotten to test for something like that. From the Chromium bug submission list, I see that this is a problem faced by many other users behind proxy servers and I'm hoping they resolve it soon.

RSS feeds also do not seem to be supported as yet :(, which definitely is something that any self-respecting browser in this age should support, and kinds of make me wonder why Goog was rushing to launch Chrome so early (maybe IE 8's recent launch has something to do with this?).

An other point to be noted, is that you need to have a moderately good system to really use Chrome, a 1 GHz machine I have (!!) simply started crawling when I tried it out.

Anyway overall I did enjoy using Chrome but using it really makes you aware that it is still Beta, and I'm really hoping that changes soon...

Google Launching Chrome beta soon....

Google is launching its own web browser named "Chrome". There is a press conference scheduled on Sep 2nd, 11 AM (Pacific Time).

Here's the google-blog page link of the new browser. Their also using quite a novel approach to market the browser initially. Using a comic strip approach for this (can be read here). You should really go through the comic, its quite interesting :).

The launch of this new browser sounds quite exciting as they are using several ideas which seem to be taking the world towards "cloud computing" (which is only logical from their point of view) and blurring the line between browser and OS.

With this they are also now directly challenging M$ IE (version 8 beta 2 was just released a week ago).

The promises of Chrome are,
On the surface,

• Clean and fast

Under the hood,

• Each tab is separate process running in a "sandbox" (preventing crashes in one affecting another).
  
• A more powerful javascript engine called V8.
  
• Better pop-up blocking (sounds promising).
  
• Move a tab from one window to another (sounds cool).
  
• Built-in Google Gears for web dever's.
  
• It's open source.

The only problems I foresee (before actually using the browser) are,

• Having individual URL boxes for each tab - I guess this is easier from a developer standpoint, as each tab is a separate process now (but Goog seems to be marketing it as a feature :))
  
• The "Default" page would have your top nine most frequently visited pages, which may not be what everyone really wants to see when you open your browser.
  
• Would it's system requirements be high (Leaning towards multi-core?)

So I guess now we'll have to wait and see how good the browser really turns out to be (it's not yet available for download). Also Chrome would be available only for Windows initially. Linux and Mac users have to wait for now. :(.

Well it's been several hours since I posted the article and the wait is killing me ... :)