While it is admittedly early to be talking about a full-blown review, I’d like to at least take a moment to discuss one of the most significant browser releases in recent history.
As someone who has spent the last 13 years writing web applications I’ve seen first hand the path modern browsers have taken to get to where they are. Knowing what I know about this path, I can also say that the journey has been a long one full of good intentions and without much concern for developers (or standards). That’s why I’m so impressed with what Google is doing here.
Apparently Google “accidentally” sent a notification about their browser intentions a day early, resulting in a frenzy around their creative and informative announcement “comic.”
Then, today, they officially released the browser that was the source of all of the discussion. With their claims of speed, performance and standards compliance I was skeptical. After all, like I said I’ve been fed the “we made it faster” line a thousand times over the past 13 years and I’ve almost never been impressed. Sure, you can benchmark browsers and prove a 3% increase in speed but what does that buy me in the real world?
When we’re talking about Chrome, however, we’re talking about insanely fast. Let me be clear, I’ve developed a LOT of applications for intranet usage (internal company networks) and I can say that the “slowness” often felt while using web pages is not a result of bandwidth limitations or slow downloading. Instead, it is a latency experienced while the inefficient browser engines parse through the code needed to create a web page. This is even more obvious when the page has complex (read: useful) JavaScript in place. All that is to say, Chrome is so fast it does away with the expectations you have about using web pages.
I’ve read where some folks had problems with pages, but I’ve looked at all of the ones I am responsible for and found no issues whatsoever. This is probably because I test them in Safari, which uses the same engine for rendering as Chrome.
So for now, those are my thoughts. I’ll post more here if things go insanely awry, but I plan to use Chrome as my primary browser at home for a while to see what I run into. Oh… and I posted this using Chrome on WordPress, so we know that works!
More Chrome Information: http://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/features.html
Download Chrome: http://tools.google.com/chrome/