Welcome to our review of Google Chrome.
Installation
Download and installation of Google Chrome was a snap. It took less than two minutes from the time I downloaded until the browser was up and running. Note that I am running most of my testing inside a VirtualBox Windows XP virtual machine, so there weren’t any bookmarks, history, etc. to import. I have seen reports that it can take longer with a large history, but my other install on a physical Windows Vista box did not seem to indicate any delays.
Start up
Start up is nearly instantaneous. The initial install opens two tabs. The first (pictured above) is the adaptive Google home page. This is the page that will pop up any time you go home, or when you open a new tab.
Initially, I didn’t think I’d really like this adaptive page very much. For me, the jury is still out. It was kind of cool to see my frequent and recent pages in thumbnails after using the browser for a while (minus the privacy implications!). The recently closed tabs and various search features also may be useful, but once I memorize some of the cool keyboard shortcuts I doubt they’ll be useful. So far my experience has been that I don’t mind this page, but I don’t really use it much either.
The other start-up tab that Google Chrome opens is a “Welcome to Google Chrome” page. The very limited set of features Google chose to cover on this page is interesting:
- One box for everything – this is an incredibly cool feature. Basically, what would usually be the URL box in previous browsers is a fully adaptive search box that attempts to guess what you want to do. After using it for most of the afternoon, back in Firefox I find myself starting to type all sorts of nonsense on the URL line. I’ll touch on this later, but I definitely see why Google included it here.
- New Tab page – I guess they’re pretty proud of this homepage. I covered that a bit above, but I find it interesting that they’re calling it the “new tab page” rather than the “home page.”
- Application shortcuts – this one I don’t really get yet. I understand the whole browser as OS thing and I’m totally down with it. I just don’t get how it’s more efficient to hide the forward and back buttons and the rest of the browser chrome (ha). For me, this is a “who cares?” – it’s something I stopped doing with javascript at least 5 or 6 years ago, and don’t really care to see again. Yeah, I created a shortcut to Gmail to see if I was missing something. If I was, I couldn’t figure out what it is (but feel free to let me know in the comments!).
First Problem
When I installed Google Chrome on my main Vista desktop, it picked up all of my Firefox plugins fine – Flash and others “just worked.”
When I went to install Adobe Flash on my testing (virtual) machine, it didn’t pick up Flash, presumably because I don’t have Firefox on that VM. I downloaded and installed and … nothing happened. No workie.
It took me a couple of install retries to guess that I needed to close and restart Google Chrome to get Flash working. This wasn’t too big of a deal for me, but it was definitely the sort of thing that would result in a panicked tech-support call from my mom.
In-Depth Google Chrome Review – Settings
Welcome back for part 2 of our in-depth Google Chrome Review. For this installment, we’ll be looking at setup and configuration of Google Chrome. If you missed part 1, click here to read it now.
Options
The Google Chrome “Options” panel is pretty simple, with only 3 tabs and a minimum of choices. Compared to IE’s 7 tabs with tons of options on each, or Firefox’s 7 preference sections + about:config, this is either blissful simplicity or a complete lack of functionality, depending on your perspective.
Basic
The basic options are, well, pretty basic.
The startup options let you choose between:
- Opening the home page – This opens the the same page you get when creating a new tab, which features the summary of your nine most visited pages, your bookmark bar, your favorite search choices, and your recent bookmarks.
- Restoring your previous session – This is my default choice. It works pretty much like Firefox does under this setting, although the lack of a “you’re about to close 20 tabs, are you sure” is a bit annoying. This will bite me when I have two windows open with 20 tabs in each.. I’m sure of it.For anyone who doesn’t have Firefox set up this way, Firefox doesn’t normally give you the “you’re about to close XX tabs” message when set to save tabs from one session to the next. However, it DOES give you the message if you have two windows open with multiple tabs and go to close the first of them, effectively destroying all of those tabs. It’s a nice feature and something I’ve come to depend on during my tabfests.
- Open the following pages – This seems useful for those that like the same pages all the time. But, I’ve had one collegue switch back to IE7 (I didn’t say he was a smart collegue!) because of the way this feature works. Apparently he’d like “Home” to switch all of his first X tabs back to this configuration. I didn’t even know this was something IE does, but it appears that’s the way he has it set up.
Home page options are pretty standard.
I guess it’s kind of cool that one of Google’s few choices is to change the default search. I’m not sure if that’s them not being evil or just trying to look like they’re not being evil, but I dig it. The list of choices is pretty short though.
Of course they have the “default browser” choice. I appreciate that they didn’t bug me with this choice right away when I started up.
Minor Tweaks
Wow, what appears at first to be a pretty simple tab of the interface and not even worth talking about turns out to be a bit of a nightmare.
Seriously, when I saw this, I immediately did a search for “google chrome major security flaw.” It turns out one had already been reported related to Webkit, but I haven’t seen this particular problem mentioned.
If you haven’t checked out the “Show saved passwords” button yet, click it. Then, click one of your accounts and click the “Show password” button. There it is, in all it’s plain text glory. Your password. For your super-psycho girlfriend to grab. While you go to the crapper. Yeah, that’s bad.
It’s funny, yesterday I was trying to figure out a keyboard shortcut for the “save password” button, but now I’m thinking I don’t need that button. There doesn’t seem to be any way to turn off this functionality or password protect the option, which means you better be super-consistent about locking your computer with that psycho-chick around. Seriously.
On this tab, you can also tweak the fonts and languages. You might want to switch to Swahili so your passwords are harder to decipher.
Under the Hood
There really isn’t a lot here for what seems to be the “advanced” tab.
You can clear out auto-open filetype associations, but you can’t view what they are – it’s an all-or-nothing thing.
You can send all of your info to Google. Like they don’t already know you like cowboy midget porn.
You can change proxy settings (which just opens the windows internet control panel).
I have no clue whatsoever what the “Show suggestions for navigation erros” checkbox does. I turned it off and tried to make all the errors I could think of, but they just got routed to search and ended up finding me what I needed.
DNS pre-fetching looks pretty cool, and might be part of why Google Chrome feels fast. It basically does all of the DNS lookups as soon as possible after loading a page, so chances are a link will have it’s DNS cached by the time you click it. Although an “about:dns” only shows it being beneficial for 9 hostnames, while doing no good for another 109. Still, that’s a nice little boost on those 9 domains.
The security stuff seems pretty standard and isn’t all that intersting, especially considering the browser is already giving away all of my passwords any time I walk away.
Extras
There are some cool extra commands hiding in the command line:
- about: – basically the About box in HTML form, not so useful
- about:dns – shows you the DNS pre-fetching success rate and some other stats. Makes me feel smart to read.
- about:plugins – info on all of your installed plugins
- about:memory – not only shows the memory usage of Chrome in each tab it has open and process it is using, but it also shows you a comparison between Chrome’s memory usage and IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari if they’re open.
- view-cache:[URL] – appears to be the browsers cache of URL … in hex.
- view-source:[URL] – I don’t see myself using this shortcut too often (I usually load a page before wanting to see the source), but who knows.
Extensions
After nearly a week putting Google Chrome through its paces, it’s definitely growing on us here at Google Chrome Review. It’s been floating in and out of default browser status as I try to get my work done, and will probably stay in love/hate status until a couple of things are cleared up. It has several killer features and a couple of painful omissions. Read on for the best and worst of Google Chrome.
Tabs
Tabs are nothing new in the browser game, but Google has managed to add a couple of interesting features that improve the tab interface in some subtle but exciting ways.
First, in Google Chrome the tab has become the top-level interface element. Tabs are no longer subservient to the address bar and the other toolbars. This isn’t all that big of a deal in and of itself, but it does enable what I think is one of the coolest new features of Chrome, and one of two features that will keep Chrome in the race to be my default browser.
Anyone who has been moving to using web apps and tabbed browsing has surely run into this sort of scenario. You have some banking transactions open in one tab, and a Google Docs spreadsheet open in another, and you want to quickly make a couple of entries in your spreadsheet using values from the bank statement.
In Firefox or IE, this evoked one of two scenarios:
- a whole lot of switching back and forth between tabs while trying to remember numbers or cutting and pasting things
- or, a painful combination of keystrokes or mouse movements to move one of the tabs to a new window so you could look at them side-by-side. In Firefox, this was something along the lines of Alt-D, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-N, Alt-D, Ctrl-V, Enter, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-W – not exactly user-friendly.
With Google Chrome, this problem is solved.
You see, in Google Chrome each tab is a full independent citizen of the windowing world. You can just grab one, drag it out, and it instantly creates a new instance browser instance. Or drag it back in and it will settle in to the tab bar. You can also drag a tab easily from one browser instance to another.
Address / Search Bar
This is the other “killer feature” in Google Chrome. What seems at first a “so what” feature (IE and FF both have some fashion of interpreting non-URL text typed into the address bar, right?) turns out to be rather liberating for the user.
It’s also (in this author’s opinion) the key reason Google wants Chrome in the hands of users.
I’ve seen a lot of speculation on Google’s reasons for making a browser of their own. Much of it is centered around changes to cookie handling in Internet Explorer 8. I agree that this can give Google more control over some of those factors. But, I think what they’ve done with Chrome is both more subtle and more brilliant than that.
Chrome’s “Omnibar” effectively replaces the entire domain name system with Google Search.
You see, what Google has done here is encourage the most basic of novice user behaviors – typing gibberish into the address bar. And, they’ve managed to make that same behavior attractive to even power-users. I’ve found that after nearly a week of using Chrome for at least half of my browsing activity, I’m getting less and less concerned about remembering URLs or choosing to search. I can just punch up the browser bar, type whatever comes to mind, and be pretty comfortable I’ll get to it in a click or two.
Sure, users can change their default search engine, but most won’t. And the more that don’t, the more search engine results pages Google gets to show. And this means more ads.
Well done, Google.
Downloads
Like most of the interface elements in Chrome, the entire download interface is very minimalist and very clean.
There is no separate download pop-up like you see in most browsers.
When you click a download link, your download begins immediately and drops to a wide bar at the bottom of the browser, where you can watch the status of the download as it’s happening.
As you download more files, each new file goes to the far left of this bar, sliding the remaining files to the right. When you run out of room on the bar, files drop off the right side (this download status bar also seems to show a maximum of four files, even if you have room for it to show more).
This bar is specific to the particular tab you have open, so you can see your most recent downloads on a per-tab basis.
To view all of your current and past downloads, you can click the “Show all downloads” link on the right side of the page. This opens a new browser tab that shows all of your downloads sorted from most recent and grouped by date. It’s again an incredibly clean interface.
I really like the lack of a download confirmation. There’s no “you are about to download a file – are you sure?!” type message. There is still a normal confirmation when you go to open or run a downloaded file, so I don’t think this will be too much of a security issue for novice users.
Adaptive Homepage
I talked about this in some detail in Part 1 of this review, so I won’t go into too much detail here.
After a week, my view hasn’t change on it too much. I don’t think I’ll really use it much, even though it looks pretty nice.
The “Most Visited” thumbnails move around too much to be as quick for me as typing the first couple of letters of my favorite sites’ addresses – generally I’m going to know the URL for my most visited sites.
Similarly, the “searches” feature is cool, but it’s much easier for me to type “ebay ” and my search term than to get to this page and click a search box. I do think this will be a very popular feature though for some users, and the discoverability of the “ebay ” shortcut could use some work.
For better or worse, iTunes and the iTunes Store have become a significant part of the digital media consumption. In fact, it’s such a common part of the experience that Apple just expects that everyone has installed it.
