Battlemouth

Since Firefox was in beta it has been my browser of choice. It was extensible, yet small enough out of the box to give you freedom and to fit your needs perfectly without hitting you over the head with features. Firefox 2 eliminated the need most of the extra plugins that I used and made page loads faster and cut down on memory usage.

Recently Firefox 3 has come out, and while there isn’t too much different between it and its predecessor, it run considerably faster and cleaner, and competes with new windows browsers like safari and opera which have always offered such fast page rendering.

Recently Internet explorer 8 has come out and one-upped Firefox with features like accelerators that load pages you visit faster, InPrivate browser windows that don’t keep history when closed (finally stolen from safari), and a few more things like Web Slices. Even with all these welcome additions, IE isn’t as customizable as Firefox by any means, and is still a little wonky.

But earlier in the week the browsing world was hit with the bomb that is Google Chrome.

Google released a browser designed from the ground up (from the netscape navigator system that firefox is based on) to be extremely small, extremely simple and extremely fast. Unique to Chrome is the feature of multi-threaded rendering of web pages, which basically means that every script on a page is executed separately. Google actually made a comic to help illustrate the differences and the benefits of it.

The comic goes on to explain the browsers other unique technical features like the built in tab and plugins task manager which allows you to quickly see and terminate a web page that’s misbehaving and the about:memory tab, which shows every browser running on your system, how much private and shared memory each is using, and how much private and shared memory each tab and plugin are using. This allows you to easily compare apples to apples in a world where most of your perception of fast and efficient is based on how fast the page loads.

There are numerous other cosmetic features. Chrome looks absolutely awesome on both vista and XP. Opening a new tab shows an opera-esque page of all your most visited sites and a bookmarks toolbar which works phenomenal and supports folders and rss feeds as in Firefox. When you’re on a web page, all you see is back, forward, reload, the address bar, whether it’s bookmarked or not, and your basic settings button. There’s also a psuedo Full Screen mode (above) similar to safari.  Coolest of all of the features is that there’s a web application that you use constantly you can easily make a bookmark that opens it with no frills or buttons whatsoever.

This last one can make web programs like Google Docs into full featured programs for your computer, and even make something like wordpress, seem like a built in application. This feature has enormous potential as a way to help keep your children on certain websites and as a way to increase productivity in corporate settings.

There are a lot of things that Chrome is lacking that you can extend to Firefox, Spelling Checking being number 1. The plugin I miss the most is greasemonkey, the custom scripting tool and plugin manager. I might also say that Sxipper is also missed, but Chrome does such a great job with passwords that I can do without it for now. I’m also missing stumble-upon and Del.icio.us and Digg, along with searches for sites other than Google, but I have confidence these will arrive in time. Truth is that besides what you can add to Firefox, Chrome has everything Firefox does, and IE 8 does, and Safari does, and then some, and will import everything you need including plugins from Firefox.

The only bad thing (and kind of scary) about Chrome is that it can be installed on any machine even if the current user is not logged in as the administrator, similar to the way the Google bar and Google desktop install. This will certainly put some steam under the collar of administrators around the world, but seems innocent enough.

All in all, if you use or emulate windows, Chrome is worth trying out, and I believe that once you get to know it, it will seriously challenge whatever your browser of choice is, it’s that good. Like I said, I’ve been evaluating core browsers for years, switching between them and switching back. I may not switch back from Chrome. I haven’t hit the “Make Chrome your default browser” button yet, but my fingers are starting to itch.