Thoughts on Google Chrome
Having the full set of “tools” available on each tab again just makes life easier, and puts things where you need them, rather than taking up screen space with menu bars and toolbars and bookmarks bars, and a bar for just about everything else besides.
Of course Chrome, and Google, like any developer and app has it’s detractors. There are those who say it’s impossible to find anything – fine, there’s tons of other browsers out there for them. There are those who complain that Google’s products are in beta and inordinately long time and that they’re buggy. Yeah, so there are some bugs. At the end of the day though, beta’s just a word and while the Microsoft’s of this world develop their apps, package ‘em up all shiny and charge a small fortune for them, and then deal with the inevitable bugs that are still there by calling their fixes a “service pack” or an enhancement, Google chooses to leave the “beta” word there and carry on the development process with input from their user base. No app with more than a few hundred lines of code’s ever gonna be totally bug free, and while it’s a small distinction in Google saying “yeah, so we’re not perfect and there’s still some more bugs than we’d like so we’re still calling it beta”, for me it’s an important distinction because it’s more honest.
What’s missing from Chrome? Well I have to say that the only thing that majorly irks me with it is the lack of a bookmark manager. By that I mean there’s no way of shuffling around bookmarks into different folders wrapped up in a nice GUI, but having said that, if you’ve got a page on screen that’s bookmarked, you can edit it straight from the omnibox by clicking on the little star and shuffle it into whatever folder you like, so maybe that’s not such a biggie after all. I used a bookmark synchroniser to keep all my bookmarks synched between Firefox, Opera (which I used for a while before discovering Chrome due to Firefox’s problems), and IE, and somewhere along the lines a few duplicate folders complete with duplicate bookmark contents have crept in. Yes, there’s probably a way of finding out where the bookmarks are stored locally and editing that (not that I’ve tried it), even though there’s not yet a bookmark export feature, but as with most beta’s you have to remember that not all features are available, and that it is after all a fairly early beta. I have actually found a workaround for the duplicate bookmarks actually, and that’s to drag the bookmark with the bookmark list open into one of the double folders, repeat with the others in the duplicate folder, and then once it’s empty just right click and delete the now empty folder.
Of all the extensions I have on Firefox, the majority of which I rarely if ever use, like a good many more people I suspect, probably the only ones I miss are the web development toolbar, the colour dropper and “MeasureIt” for measuring elements on screen. As yet, third party enhancements for Chrome aren’t available, but again, it’s an early beta, and I’m sure these things will come in time.
Overall, I’m very impressed, and if the current Chrome is anything to go by, later versions are going to knock the socks off other browsers. One of my arguments against Firefox for a while now (and this is as an until very recently die-hard Firefox supporter and defender) is that your typical web user without geeky credentials, with no interest in how things work behind the scenes, just isn’t interested in having to uninstall and reinstall extensions and play about with settings on Fiirefox to get things working. They just want something that works, and if Firefox starts misbehaving they’re liable to just ditch it and switch to something that’s more stable, and that could potentially cost Firefox a lot of lost users. Opera too has a range of extras available now, but it’s infinitely more stable than Firefox, the user community’s well supported, and it just generally seems a lot more stable and “cobbled together” than Firefox, which in comparison seems to have a sort of “it’ll all come out right in the wash” attitude – that yeah, okay it may be buggy, but the next version will be much better. The trouble is the competition these days is looking a lot more professional, and if Firefox wants to get away from it’s geeky image and into the mainstream in a serious way, it’s gonna have to improve it’s game and get much more professional.
Is Chrome going to be a serious contender? I’m putting my money on a “yes” vote. As the boundaries between offline and online blur even more, and applications as web services and web features on your desktop become more common, I’ve a feeling the public will go for the simplicity of Chrome that makes knowing where you type what you want so easy even a web novice can do it. Gmail’s so popular because it makes keeping up to date with your email so easy, but if you want to you can download your emails to a traditional email client just as you’ve always done, link multiple email addresses to your one Gmail address, do all kinds of fancy tricks with your address and filtering, and as if that’s not enough, use the insane amounts of storage space they give you for storing files as well. In turning the concept of a browser on it’s head and designing for what’s best for stability and what people actually want from a browser rather than giving them what they’ve always had, Google are doing the same thing with Chrome, and if I were one for betting, I’d be betting that the surfing public are going to quite like Chrome.
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