The world is abuzz with the imminent release of Google Chrome today. The screenshots on CNet were apparently from the new site that was live for a short time. The news slipped out (or leaked) when, according to the Google blog, they “hit ‘send’ a bit early” and released the Google Chrome comic strip prematurely.
The comic is a great piece of work by Scott McCloud. It’s a gold-mine of interesting propaganda, and I’d love to link to some of my favourite sections but there’s a critical failing: none of the pages have a permalink! Some kind soul has taken the time to republish the strip so they can be linked although the site was slowing down already when I last visited.
Does the world need another browser? Do we need another browser to test our work on? Those seem to be the questions I hear first. However, Chrome is built on WebKit, the open source engine that also powers Safari. Safari is also my browser of choice right now — WebKit passes the Acid 3 test and Safari has the best font rendering of any browser I’ve tried — so that gives me hope. Also, Chrome will be open source, and with a few new ideas may push browser science along a little bit in a good direction, especially around security, performance and the UI.
When I heard the name, it reminded me of the DHTML tricks we used to use way back to remove the chrome from the browser window — effectively stripping it of everything that wasn’t content. Google has said:
“We don’t want to interrupt anything the user is trying to do. If you can just ignore the browser we’ve done a good job.”
I do a pretty good job of ignoring the browser already. However, there are problems we’ve all been working around for a long time that Chrome wants to solve. Most of the advances have a visual metaphor in their approach to tabs. Here are some of the things that caught my eye:
The tab is king
Tabs will be at the top of the browser window as they are in Opera, making utilities like the address bar part of an individual tab. It makes sense to me: Often I find, when talking to less technical people and trying to get them to go to a URL, they’re so used to ignoring the address bar that I have to help them find it before they can start typing. Google don’t have a URL box though, they have an “omnibox” that does everything from remembering visited URLs to giving search suggestions and allowing us to do free text history searches. It also does autocompletion. The comic strip explicitly mentions getting this right but, just in case it doesn’t, I hope autocomplete can be toggled off.
In Chrome, the browser controls and URL box are explicitly associated with that unique tab. Everything associated with the site open in the tab is contained within it so it can be moved or detached completely from the window.
However, people often ignore the page title, too. In the past, this has led to all sorts of wacky, useless and inaccessible page titles being used by developers to stuff keywords or just have fun. I would of liked to have seen the page title better associated with the viewport, and visible in full, not just as part of the tab label.
Oi, JavaScript, stop!
How many times does an errant bit of JavaScript slow down the browser to a crawl and sometimes even crash the whole caboodle? Too many times. Chrome has a whole new JavaScript virtual machine dubbed V8. It also claims a multi-threading approach that sandboxes each individual tab so it won’t affect other open tabs, which allows us to close it and kill the process if it’s getting out of hand. They’re also giving us a task manager to enable us to see which tabs or plugins are causing problems by seeing the processing running and how much memory they’re using. Sounds good to me.
Confined pop-ups
Chrome will associate pop-ups with each individual tab, and confine them within that tab unless people drag them out to become a new window; an enhancement to just blocking all pop-ups altogether when some are used for legitimate purposes.
Default tab page
When a new tab is opened, Chrome will open a tab page with nine of your most visited pages, search history, recently closed and bookmarks. It sounds like an evolved version of Opera’s Speed Dial (Flash demo), that automatically populates the holding page by default.
Site-specific Chrome
Taking a lead from apps I find incredibly useful like Fluid, Chrome will allow site-sepcific browsing to access sites like Google Mail in a streamlined window. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do that for any URL, and create icons in much the same way I can with Fluid now.
Security
Chrome would seem to take sand boxing to its natural conclusion, isolating individual sites from any other open tab, and not allowing access to anything without user permission. I’ll be interested to see what the web app security experts say about this, especially in relation to XSS and CSRF attacks. Chrome will also continually download blacklists for phishing and malware sites and warn users when they visit them. Those lists will also be open source.
Typography?
I can’t talk about a new browser without mentioning typography. The WebKit rendering engine already gives Chrome an advantage to build on for web type. All I want to say is that I hope they take a lead from the great work being done with things like @font-face support, and keep a beady eye on the most important thing a browser has to do: help us read. Hopefully, nothing in Chrome will limit the fine work the WebKit team are doing to make hinting, anti-aliasing, grid-fitting and hyphenation as good as they can be. Chrome will be released for Windows first. I’m looking forward to see how it reads, but how it integrated with OS X’s native text rendering will also be very interesting.
One thing is…
Google Chrome has already changed the browser landscape and it’s not released yet. We’ll see if all the web application savvy at Google Inc. emerges in the browser — I’m looking forward to it. After all, if we can’t just have one very good browser to design and develop for (oh, what luxury that would be), we may as well have another using WebKit — a rendering engine that’s committed to standards support, is open source, and doing a fine job already.
14 Comments
1. By Andrea Gandino on 2nd Sep ’08 at 13:12pm
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