One Week with Google Chrome
So it’s been just about a full working week since having downloaded and installed Google Chrome, the shiny and new Web browser from the big G. I’ve been using it at work every day since, and have some thoughts about things that work, and things I’d like to see for the future of this pretty nifty browser.
Pros:
- It’s fast. Really fast. Opening a new tab, closing an existing one, reordering them, navigating and loading up Web sites and Web apps, scrolling around a page, saving a bookmark. Everything happens so quickly and in such a snappy way that it just feels incredibly responsive. The browser feels almost transparent, exactly how it should be.
- It feels natural. Open a new tab, and drag it around the tab bar. Now close it. Open another few. (Go ahead, I’ll wait) See those subtle animations as a tab floats over the other just briefly? This is a form of feedback that most well-designed applications use to convey that something has happened as a result of your action.
It gives users a good feeling about what they’re doing, and often replicates some form of kinetic movement like gravity, acceleration and momentum to simulate natural movement. You’ll see this a lot with applications for the Mac, and it’s used very strategically on the iPhone to give it a really polished feel. In fact, Apple makes special note of this in its developer Human Interface Guidelines, “Animation is a great way to provide feedback to users, as long as it’s both subtle and meaningful.”
- It’s unobtrusive. One thing I really dislike with Internet Explorer is that it has a monstrous overhead to the browser with icons, bookmarks, and navigation all competing for pixels on your screen. Let me browser the content on the Web browser, and just get out of the way! Firefox even has a comparatively large interface footprint at the top and bottom of the window. By comparison, Chrome has moved their tab bar to the top of the window, done away with menus, and has a status bar that appears and disappears depending on if anything is actually still loading on the page. Smart.
Cons:
- The blue colour of the browser window is very distracting. I can see how it would blend a little better with a Windows XP user’s default blue theme, but I use the classic theme specifically because it’s bland and devoid of any colour. When I’m doing wireframes or design work, I don’t need any flashy interface colours getting in the way or distracting me. I’m sure this can be changed somehow or in a future version making it much more customizable, though.
- Importing bookmarks from Firefox was a pain. I couldn’t manage to find if there was a bookmarks management option, so I ended up having to drag all my bookmark bar links into place manually from the imported folder, which was super tedious. I know the Google team was going for a minimal aesthetic with this browser, but some richer bookmark management abilities would be nice.
- Extensions! I’m not sure if Google has a roadmap to make the browser extensible, but seeing that it’s open source, I can’t see why it couldn’t be. Part of what makes Firefox so great to use is that you can tailor the browser to work for you by installing extensions like (my favourites), weather forecasts, browser and user agent simulations, and ad blockers. I don’t use too many, but I love the ones that I have.
Overall it’s a really solid browser, and an impressive first release. I’m really looking forward to what the Google team puts out in the future for this browser, as I can easily see it being my primary browser on the PC and (please!) the Mac.
12 comments
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Something that irks me, but not many other people, is the lack of middle mouse button support. People who use mice will often use a scroll wheel to go through a page, and the scroll wheel works fine in Chrome. Thing is, you can also, in other browsers (not safari, though) press the middle mouse button and get an auto-scroll function, which will then scroll depending on where you move the mouse.
Because I use a tablet as my “mouse” and it has no scroll wheel, I’ve mapped the middle mouse button to one of the nibs on the pen itself. This lets me scroll through a page very quickly and not lose the desired scroll wheel functionality that everyone else gets. Chrome doesn’t recognize this so I’m instead dragging the bar on the right of pages or using the touch wheel at the top of the tablet to scroll. Far from ideal.
Last thing I want? The option to make new tabs appear at the end of my tab list (instead of immediately after the tab I’m currently on) as well as the ability to jump straight to the new tab I open from within another page. If I’m opening a link, it’s safe to say I generally want to see it NOW and not save it for later. I like the browser, otherwise, though very much. Wicked fast, particularly on startup.
Funny you mention all of those things – I think I browse the Web in the complete opposite way (so Chrome works great for me)
I never use the middle mouse scroll, but I can see how some people have grown attached to it, so I’m sure we’ll see that as a preference at some point that you can toggle on/off. Same goes for the rest of the things you mentioned – they’re really just personal options.
The great thing about open source is that there’s probably some developer out there who works just like you and will hack it to work in the next version like that (or give you the option to turn it on).
Personally I love that tabs open immediately after the tab I’m working in. It gives the tab context in its position, so after I close my current one, that one will immediately open so I can see whatever’s there. My way of working with tabs is that they’re sort of my sequential reading list. I’ll go through them one by one until there’s none left.
I was surprised they didn’t make the differentiation between background tabs and normal tabs. Background tabs open the way Chrome opens tabs, normal tabs open immediately. Its one thing that Opera has over FF and Chrome.
I’m not enamoured with the look of Chrome, the aesthetics look awkward to me, unbalanced. I do like the functional design though, I love that there are so few elements in the interface, yet it’s everything you need.
Everyone has habits when using apps and we’re all different, obviously Chrome’s not going to make everyone happy. Personally I dislike the lack of a bookmarks sidebar, a horizontal bar is just a bad use of space. I can fit perhaps ten or so bookmarks on the bar, a fraction of the bookmarks I use on a regular basis, but with a sidebar I can fit tens of links into a re-sizable space. Stacking is better than rowing in this case. Clicking on the “Other bookmarks” button and surfing through folders to find links is not my idea of efficiency.
I think one of the things that will clinch my default browser choice is ads. With FF I can install any number of addons to block ads successfully. I can’t see Google allowing you to do that on their browser. Ads are their bread and butter. They have a pop-up blocker sure, but I’d be surprised if they give developers free reign to make plugins that go against their base interest. They might, it will be interesting to see how defensive they are on that point. In the meantime FireFox remains my browser.
Oh, and the best feature of the browser for me, the incognito window. I love the idea that I can browse outside of my normal circle of sites without leaving a trail of cookies and other crap in my web folders.
Importing bookmarks was a pain? I’ve never seen an *easier* process. It did it all automatically on install. Not sure what you did wrong (did you choose to “skip import” during install?).
It’s possible I guess. Didn’t put anything in the bookmarks bar when I imported.
I was impressed with the bookmark-importing, too, especially since so many of my Firefox bookmarks are dupes of my IE bookmarks. No dupes in Chrome, though!
On my fast test machines, Chrome is peerless, but on my slower test machine I notice a 2-4 second hesitation in user control when accessing the remaining tabs after one tab has been closed. Possibly due to memory re-allocation?
I have to giggle when I read the outrage surrounding the EULA and big-brotherish info-gathering facilitated by Chrome. Do people actually believe their ISP doesn’t do this already?
Well good to hear others are having better luck with the import process. Probably just a one-off bug that I hit.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the performance is like on the Mac. It work great on my beefed up ThinkPad at work on Win XP, but my Mac has been really sluggish lately so if it’s faster than Safari, I’ll switch in a second.
Also, once automated-testing tools like Selenium are retooled for Chrome, my (work) life’ll be much happier. Have you heard anything about that, Adam?
One other weirdness, though… I find the editing of entry box text is a bit stuttery on my fast Vista box.
I haven’t heard of it – it’s been a while since my testing days, but yeah in general it’ll be great when Chrome gets a little more extensible.
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