I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser for about 30 minutes now, and I just wanted to give people a few points of interest that I’ve found so far.
Rendering: This thing is unbelievably fast. I was impressed with the recode of Gecko that was released with FireFox 3, but the Webkit backend of Chrome is nothing short of insane. Gecko managed to expose what I call download lag (the time it takes for the first renderable chunk of HTML to come down from a server), but Chrome has managed to hang it out for all to see. Even historically fast pages now show some download lag because the rendering engine in Chrome literally snaps pages into place when they’re loaded.
Features: The ability to pop a browser window out and use it as a discreet application on your computer is phenomenal. Using GMail as an example, it really makes the web application feel as though you’re using something you actually installed. Couple that with the increased rendering speed of Chrome, and you have something that approaches or, in some cases, exceeds the performance of desktop applications.
Compatibility: This is something ongoing, and will improve over time, but even now, I’m having trouble finding a site that won’t render properly. I have been hearing scattered reports about plugins not working, but that’s about it so far.
Extensibility: It’s OpenSource. Don’t like it? Fix it. Want a new feature? Create it.
Security and Stability: Every tab has its own discreet process on the system. This keeps web pages from bringing down the entire browser when something goes wrong. It also appears to make memory management easier, as freed memory is flushed better than when the browser is re-using memory segments. This should show great benefits as power users that open tabs continuously don’t lose performance as quickly (or at all, as is the possibility)
I plan on playing with this a lot over the next few days, so keep checking back here for more details.
Google scores huge with this one.
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