Chrome plated

3 September 2008 - 10:26

Last night I fired up a Windows XP VM and installed Google's shiny new web browser, Chrome. My quick impression: it looks good, it's fast, and I didn't detect any rendering problems on the pages I tried. Nice job. But what does Google Chrome bring to the table that other web browsers don't? Do we need yet another web browser?

With the name Google behind it, I guess Chrome is going to be quite popular, especially among those who must have the newest / coolest stuff. Which is going to make it a must-install for webmasters, in order to check their pages look okay in it. Chrome uses Webkit, an open source web browser engine that is used in Apple's Safari browser. It shouldn't cause too many problems for webmasters, though it isn't going to make life any easier, for sure.

There are already reports that Chrome displays some pages differently to Safari. That's down to the fact that Google has had to do its own Windows port (Webkit is for OS X, and Apple's Safari for Windows uses proprietary code.) But this is still beta software, remember.

While Chrome is going to become an essential for webmasters to check pages in, what makes Firefox so great for web developers and many other users is the vast array of user-developed extensions, without which many people (including me) could not contemplate using the web. In his attempt to answer the questions that people will have about Google Chrome, Matt Cutts talks about the possibility of an extension interface being developed after the Linux and Mac OS X versions are out. So I can't see Google Chrome replacing Firefox as the power user's browser of choice for a while yet.