benzwu

What a big surprise that Google launch his Chrome into the heated war of browser. You might think that the water is saturated enough and any new players won’t be able to stir it up, but not in this case.

Google came with a revolutionary and completely different approach although it’s main rendering engine based on webkit used by Apple Safari. They change how the internal browser work by splitting each tab into each process. By doing that, the crashes and memory fragmentations are virtually gone since the process and memory are freed when tabs from a site are closed. They rebuild Javascript engine named “V8″ that work beyond even their own expectation. It’s roughly ten times faster than Firefox and Safari.

Here are my thoughts on Chrome after spend my whole day activity with it. Like any onliners, I use browser extensively.

First crash in 10 minutes. I was watching youtube video to test it’s flash compatibility. All went fine until I switch to full screen mode. It just froze. I tried to open up task manager and I found many Chrome processes. I assume this flash video thing took the most memory among all other processes so I try to kill the biggest one. Suddenly the Chrome back on and the youtube tab is still open with a “died plugin” icon on top the video frame. Quite neat, I don’t have to lose other tabs when one tab went wild.

Since each site took (approximately) one system process (with additional 1 main process to manage the tabs), it took more memory than other browser at first. At long run, it stay slim compared to other browser that tend to eat up more memory as time goes by. The exact process counting is not very clear to me. I tried to open 14 tabs from 2 sites, it tooks 4 processes. One of them is Wordpress Turbo enabled. Maybe Chrome spawn new process for Gears. 1 Main, 2 for each sites, 1 for Gears.

The Gears is built in. No wonder they launch this after they manage to make Gears support for Safari. The Chrome identified as Safari by Wordpress Turbo feature. So far all works fine.

Speedy javascript performance. I tried a web based chat using AJAX, it runs blazing fast compared to traditional javascript engine on other browser.

Nice tab behavior. I have a habit to open links on other tabs at once and then read them later. The new tab open at the end of current group tab and shift other tabs on the right. Nice opening and closing tab animation too. Here is the illustration, ABC -> A1A2BC -> A1A2A3BC

Simple interface. Chrome try to maximize user area instead having many menu bar. I can browse more convenience now.

Incognito mode. Currently I’m using in incognito mode on a shared computer. Just close the incognito window and all your trace are gone. Pretty slick. Like it.

Omni bar. In Chrome the address bar and search bar is combined into one, address url and keyword search typed in one place. For me, it’s a plus point. I just type the words that I want to seach in omnibar and don’t have to worry where to type like other browsers that have separate field.

That’s all for now. I’ll add up some more later. Can’t wait for Mac OS X version.