To me a big part of moving or travelling is the technology I bring with me. In anticipation of my move to Brazil, I’ve made a series of strategic purchases and downloads which I hope will help soften the blow of walking into the unknown. Some of these have been expensive, like my Blackberry Curve which I probably won’t be able to activate down there for a while, since the endless bureaucracy of Brazilian mobile phone companies ask for a “proof of residence” (a phone or gas bill) before you can sign up for a monthly plan. Others have been cheaper, like Mass Effect, a game which I plan to slot into my schedule during hours usually reserved for spending time with other people.
And some have been free. This is the case with Google Chrome, released by Google today as its entry platform into the web browser market — one currently dominated by IE, which holds 72% of market share, and Firefox, which has 20%.
There are a few things you notice about Google Chrome in the first few minutes of use. Installation was extremely streamlined and spared me useless questions about priority and location, and it seems to understand that if I want any extra features I can go back think about them later. Also, Chrome seems to have a pretty low RAM footprint — it has been hovering at a solid 40mb, even with Gmail and several tabs open.
Visually, it looks like a skinned Firefox, which isn’t surprising. Google says it’s set out to create “a modern platform for web pages and applications”, telling us that for most people the browser isn’t really what is central about how you spend time on the internet — it’s a tool to help you access what you actually want to see. Google really seems to have lived up to this idea, given that most features are either accessed contextually or through two discrete buttons to the right of the “Omni Bar”.
Chrome really seems to understand the nature of the internet today. In an overly-cute introductory comic (worth a look, it’s by Scott McCloud). At least for me, most of my time spent online is not reading webpages or scrolling through unformatted text, but interacting with applications, applets, etc, some which might only exist to help me read websites, but which play an important role nonetheless. If you were to rank the websites I visit in terms of pageviews, 80% of visits would fall within pages that are partial or full web applications — most of Google’s apps, Digg, StumbleUpon, none of which behave like the regular pages of 5 years ago. This is something Google understands, moreso than Firefox. by allowing us to add application shortcuts to your shortcuts and folders. I’ve added a bunch to my RocketDock, and now getting to my favorite apps takes much less time. Chrome creates icons based on the browser icons by expanding them to desktop size, which looks hideous, but that’s a minor problem.
Another feature which really made me happy was Incognito Mode (already nicknamed “Porn Mode” by a few), which allows you to open a new window which doesn’t save your browsing history, cookies or temporary files. It’s all gone once you end your session. Not that I spend too much time engaging in secretive activities, but sometimes there are PG websites I visit which I would like to keep out of my history without deleting the whole thing — for example, one time I kept food diary online which became a running joke for like 3 weeks once my friends found it. Incognito Mode would also be very useful if you installed Chrome at work; the NA could check your logs but you wouldn’t have to worry about anything being saved.
In summary, it’s a great application. There are tons of small other features which really make a difference, like instant bookmarking, etc. The rest are mostly features which can be added to Firefox through add-ons/greasemonkey/etc, but there’s a lot to be said about what a product ships with and how it reflects the developers design philosophies, which is what will ultimately drive the direction of post-beta releases.
