I said I was going to download Google Chrome first thing in the morning, didn’t it? Well, I had a hectic morning trying to get to Tech.Ed on time so I did not manage to download the freshly baked Google Chrome Beta, but then I still managed to get it up and running after I came back in the evening. The download was small — less than 500kb, which it almost fooled me to think that Chrome is smaller than w3m! Then the installer launched and downloaded the rest. Oh well.
I was quick to get it up and running, and it takes network/proxy setting from Internet Explorer, but offers to import bookmarks, passwords and history from Firefox.
I have been running it for the last 30 minutes. Here are some first impressions.
- Fast. Really fast. WebKit is Fast. V8 is FAST. The whole Internet speeds up. Woohoo!
- It did not import my passwords from Firefox correctly because I have master password on.
- Element and resource inspector is pretty cool. Not as good as Firebug, but better than the vanilla DOM inspector.
- There’s no status bar. When you hover over a link, the URL just pops up at the lower-left-hand corner.
- Lack of title bar is annoying, because you can’t really easily see the full title (well you can only when you hover over the tab and the full title comes up in tool tip).
- Crashed twice on me I have to go to Task Manager to kill all chrome.exe. While the offending tab crashes (which happens to be Gmail, how ironic), the entire Chrome window + other tabs become unresponsive.
Lack of plugin also means it might not be as useful for developers, but general browsing it beats Firefox hands down in terms of speed and responsiveness. Like most Google software it’s still in beta — and if it is like Gmail it would be in “beta” for possibly a few years — so I might cut it some slack here. I might actually try to use it as my primary browser for the next week or two.
i’m willing to try it out just to see if it works more efficiently than FireFox… if it’s faster than Firefox and isn’t IE, then i’ll use it
Though it won’t be long for plugins to be built with all this hype. Im waiting for the linux version to be released. Nice blog by the way.
If you like Chrome’s stripped down Web Inspector, you will love the original, full featured version in the WebKit nightlies. Cheers!
have you read the terms and conditions?
check it out
@Leo — I think Google has been too copy’n'paste happy. Covered at Arstechnica.
You mentioned you don’t like the title bar, but that’s the best thing about Chrome that I believe. Tabs and title bar totally overlap its functionality, and vertical space is extremely important, this is a great improvement of UI.
I do not see the need to see the full HTML title deserves constant use of vertical space.
@Franky,
If you have done some SEO you would really appreciate the visibility of the full title :) Google Chrome just doesn’t do that for me.
You are mixing up UX and SEO. Having appropriate title helps SEO on that particular page but search engine should never relies on the title anyway.
The functionality of tabs titles definitely overlaps with current tab title (title bar), so what you really want is a long (or configurable) current tab width or/and multi-line tabs.
Search engines today have always heavily rely on the title of the page. And if I am looking at a web page and try to figure out why it is at the where it is in SERP but cannot see the full title text immediately — then *to me* it is an user experience issue.
The functionality of the title bar gives me the full view of the most important element of the current page, whereas the tab gives me a shortened snippet of other pages where I can switch to. There might be funtionality overlap, but they are not the same IMHO.
I am not saying title is not important, I am talking about title bar here, what SERP displays has nothing to do with it.
Tab functionality is definitely a superset of title bar. I am repeating myself here. title bar could defined as—Current tab with tab width as window width and configured to show page title as tab title. It is only Chrome UX is not configurable that way.
At least people in Google Chrome is on the same page with me here.
On a different topic, the current SE relies on page title does not mean it should, that is just a practical compromise. There are plenty of automatic summarization research done which can yield better page summary in any defined length than the average page around the web.
I too am talking about the title bar here — a clear presentation of the full title text gives you a good context on what the page is about (especially a link lands you in the middle of a page) and it certainly helps those who study the relationship between positions on SERP and the page title.
You mean, “title text displayed on a tab control” functionality is a superset of the title bar, as they aim to achieve the same thing. Tab from usability point of view has always been enabling the same displaying canvas to show and switch between multiple documents — and they were designed to be small and only able to display a short snippet of info, far less than sufficient to show a HTML page title for example.
Yes a tab control with variable width *could* solve the issue (providing document switching + full title in display) — but only when the number of tabs is very small (or everyone runs 30″ LCDs).
We do not need 30″ LCD for that, as only the current tab width is long.
IMHO, I believe screen space is the most important factor for a browser, it triumph over almost everything else. As you said, the title bar gives “context”, but when a user surf the web, they already know the context in question. Eventually someone want to look up again, but then this is not a scenario that they must do per page, it could be done by other means such as hovering on top of the tab.
There are way too many meta information we could display on the UI that gives better context or other information. We need an easy and natural way to look them up, but they should never occupy screen space when we don’t acquire them for each page that we surf.
Things that should always occupy UI space for a browser are controls that helps navigate inter/intra page, because we use them 100% of the time per page that we visit, that’s what I called common scenario.
Scrolls, back/fwd/tab/cmd(search bar/url bar) are essential. For the rest, they are not buttons but info, so the less UI physical space it acquires, the better.
I was wondering if I could “enable page title view” in Chrome, but I guess not!
I add descriptive page titles to most of the items I post to our store, and I am used to seeing page titles on the top of a browser! I guess I could live without them, as long as the SE can see the titles…
I do like the large window and big font of chrome… or does it just seem bigger??