Chrome – Thank you Google!
Chrome has only been out a few hours and I have to say I already love it. My largest complaint is there isn’t a Mac version of it yet. 90% of my work is done on a Mac, of the 10% of the time I spend on the PC about 5% of that is spent in a browser. So what is so special about Chrome?
- Extremly small download, 7mb (which includes 40+ languages)
- Fast, fast, fast.
- Virtualized JS engine (courtesy of V8 – no not the veggie drink), which I have heard is much cleaner thank Tamarin or Spidermonkey (haven’t had a chance to look myself yet).
- Offloaded cache and processing using Gears.
- Task Manager specific to the browser processes THANK YOU Google!
- Geek mode THANK YOU again, however I do miss Firebug already.
- Supplied developer tools work great, just need more.
- Crashing doesn’t take down the whole browser, instead it only blows away the specific tab. This is due to multiple processes, one per tab to be exact.
- And of course, searching Google is just that much easier.
The first thing I did was test the Disney suite of sites, better we catch the bugs before the evil QA department does (just kidding Eric, don’t assign me more bugs because of that last comment). The only major bug I have noticed so far is some redraw issues when AVM1 content is running inside of AVM2. Play some of the games on the Disney site and you will notice that the redraw hangs unless you scroll to the bottom of the page and back up. It seems to happen once AVM2 content is layered over top of AVM1 content. If no AVM2 content is layered over the AVM1 content everything seems to work fine. Sounds like more of a Flash Player bug then a Chrome bug.
The second issue I just noticed (which actually may be a feature) is multiple alpha tween animations seem to not animate, instead the content all pops on once all the tweened instances are complete.
I am not a huge fan of the default text rendering, probably one of the many reasons why the pages draw so quickly. IMHO the text looks like ass.
The other major problem is penetration, what is it going to take to get the world to download this browser. Sure the developer world is a buzz right now, but I don’t think the average joe is pumped about a new browser. Hopefully Microsoft and Mozilla learn or thing or two about browser development.