Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Impressed by chrome

Here I am again, at the head of the early adopters head. If you haven't heard yet, google released a web browser today called chrome. Things I like so far:
  • Minimalistic browser UI. The funny thing is that it looks like my firefox browser usually does! I remove most buttons, have the URL bar in the same bar as the buttons, and reduce the menu to a single menu item (by using tiny-menu addon).
  • Love how they use the wasted space of the window top border to put the tabs.
  • Loaded some of my more js heavy sites quite a bit quicker than FF and IE.
  • I can finally see which tab is the nutty one, and shoot it in the head!
  • It comes with a javascript console! Thank goodness. How long did it take IE before they figured that us devs need one of those thing badly?
Did some random "testing" to see if it really did seemed to have a better garbage collector than firefox. I'm impressed.
As many other devs out there, my exitement is a bit tempered by the idea of possibly having to support "yet another browser".  Here is to hoping this turns out to be a non-issue.
Now, if I can figure how to make it open pdfs with something other than Acrobat Reader... Will keep my eyes open for the linux version, and for the add-ons support.

2 comments:

Jen said...

Darn, I really need to catch up on my google-related feeds...did not know about this. Was it common knowledge it was being developed? Chrome is silver and I love silver. Sweet.

Unknown said...

Yes you do! In this context, chrome is used to mean http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/C/chrome.html