Thoughts on Google Chrome
Now I’m not normally one for installing and using betas willy-nilly; they’re usually bug ridden and unstable, and I have quite enough of that just working on a computer with Windoze installed on it, thank you very much!
When I read the new Google comic book on the development of the new browser on the block though, Google Chrome, I couldn’t help but be impressed at the ideas behind it. The background to this by the way is that for weeks now I’ve had a very badly behaved Firefox install on my laptop, and I’ve switched backwards and forwards between Firefox 2.0.16 and 3.01 so many times that my poor computer’s dizzy just trying to keep up with it all. Constant crashes, locking up, and refusing to close, even when forcibly ending the process in Task Manager have refused to get rid of the damned thing! Mind you, IE’s been just as bad, but then that’s nothing new.
None of this has been helped by the fact that I’ve also been suffering from a very temperamental internet connection that’s been requiring me to re-boot sometimes upwards of ten times a day to get it running again.
On a web design forum I frequent at times someone had posted a thread about Chrome, and a link to the comic. I was hooked by Page 2 where they started talking about browsers needing to be more stable (yeah, so I probably really do need to get out more!) – after my recent experiences with Firefox etc. I’d heartily agree with that! Despite the apparent increased memory usage Chrome’s reported to have (which I have to say, having used it for about three weeks now I’ve not noticed, but then I am used to the memory hog that’s Firefox), the multi-threading makes sense – that’s how a web server OS operates and copes with thousands of requests being thrown at it all at once without crashing (see, I did remember something from the server management course I did last year!), so Google’s memory bloat argument makes a hell of a lot of sense from an architecture point of view. I have to say though, I’ve not particularly noticed a memory problem with Chrome at all though. With just Chrome running in additional to all the background processes, mostly I’m setting around 20% CPU usage and around 40% RAM usage on an AMD Turion X2 Dual-core Mobile RM-70 processor with 3 gig of RAM. More often than not, I’ve got multiple apps open, as I like to keep them handy on the Task Bar without faffing around waiting for them to open them up, especially if it’s something I’m using on and off all day. No problems with it running whatsoever though.
The second big selling point is that unlike the incredibly memory-leaky Firefox, a tab crashing isn’t going to crash the whole browser…and a task manager for each tab – now that’s really cool! (So, yeah, I know, I need to get out more!) In three weeks of using it, I’ve only had to kill one tab in that whole time, and the others went right on working. I just opened up another tab and the same site again, and continued where I left off. Compared to the multiple re-starts needed with Firefox, it’s been an absolute joy to use a browser that just works. Yes, people might be worried about Google taking over the world (like 90% of the world’s remotely bothered by Microsoft having a strangle-hold on almost the entire global PC software market anyway), but like they say, they’re a huge organisation with the infrastructure to do massive scale testing and catch bugs early.
The idea of having threads for different processes, all with their own memory, so they’re not hanging around waiting for some other process to finish so they can do their stuff makes a great amount of sense. Similarly, having the javascript engine generate machine code makes a lot of sense; why have a javascript engine that generates code that has to be interpreted when you can generate machine code that can be run directly on the CPU that’s running the browser? And when they started talking about designing the UI, again, by designing it from the user’s point of view (rather than saying, “this is how it’s always been done, so this is what we’ll do”), again, it makes sense (and Opera with it’s ’speed dial’, which I love, is a lot like their new tab page), and the sandbox too is a good idea.
I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for around three weeks now. I love the simplicity of the UI. Much like the LOTR with one box to rule them all, combining the search box and address bar into what Google call the “omnibox” just makes sense. For my mother, who has difficulty figuring out where to type the address and where to put what she wants to search for, I can see it will have an enormous benefit (and to me too, as I won’t have to re-do “How to use a search engine 101″ with her on a weekly basis!), but the minimalism of the whole interface just works. Devoid of all the buttons and menus and places to type things you find in a traditional browser, you get what you need, without all the distractions. Even being able to bookmark sites straight from the omnibox is just so intuitive, and I now find myself when at work and forced to use IE struggling to figure out where I need to press when in Chrome it’s just so there.
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