Adventures in Nerdville

In case you have been living in a cave for the last 3 days, Google has come out with a new web browser called Chrome. Right now it is only in beta, but so far it I am very impressed. After only a day of playing around, here are my favorite features.

Tabs are Separate Processes: This makes it so that if one tab stops responding, you don’t lose the entire window (or all browser windows as it is with firefox). It also makes it blazing fast on multi-processor systems.

Built in Firebug-esque Inspector: At first glance, I was really bummed that there was no plugin support because I can’t stand to develop without firebug. When I right clicked on a page however, I was greeted with the familiar ‘Inspect Element’ option. This brings up a box that is very comfortable for those of us used to firebug.

BLAZING Javascript: The new V8 javascript engine (I am guessing the pun is intended) has been raved about online since Chrome was released to the public. Just try it out.

BLAZING Load Time: The first time I open it after my system boots, I can barely finish my second click before Chrome appears whereas FF3 takes up to 5 (my system has a Phenom + 4gb ram).

I can definitely see Chrome gaining a significant amount of market share. Sadly, I think that most of that will be taken from Firefox, which is still a fantastic browser. I will be glad if the popularity of Google will pull away some of the IE’rs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Geekiness-NotSoMuch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.