They borrowed some UI concepts from Opera and IE (controls and address bar inside the tabs, speed dial, paste-and-go) but I think they've done some things better. For instance: the default home page requires zero user interaction, the status bar is only present when you hover over a link, tab cycling makes sense and requires zero thought.
They really didn't want to introduce another rendering engine for developers - so Google is simply using WebKit, it won't be a fork
No tie-ins to Google Services installed by default
They've been working on it for two years
V8 will eventually make its way into Android
They haven't made very many contributions to Webkit, but are fully committed to doing so. Their plan is to build Chrome off the WebKit tip
Extensibility - though they obviously support traditional browser plugins and they have plans for a richer extension API - it won't be in the Beta.
UA String is: "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13" =>Google, please work to shorten the UA string, not lengthen it (is there really any valid reason for "Safari/..." to be there?)
The browser is fast. Transition is seemless. I like that the default home page requires no user interaction to generate. Ctrl+L, Ctrl+K, Alt+D, Ctrl+T all work as I expected.
They are using an older version of WebKit (older than Safari 3.1 it looks like) as there are two SVG-related rendering problems with my site that I thought were long gone
They have a sense of humour (open up the Chrome Task manager and see the link at the bottom)
Further Exploration:
I'm curious how browsers like IE and Chrome are ensuring that access to the browser cache is shared efficiently across all processes?
I'd like to learn more about the 'cross-platform' graphics library that they are using, does it support hardware acceleration?
Are other browser vendors worried that the editor of the HTML5 spec is now an employee of a browser vendor?
What are Google Chrome's plans for feeds? At the moment, there isn't even any auto-discovery
§494 · September 2, 2008 · Life · Comments Off on More About Chrome · Tags: browsers, chrome, Google
I took 20 minutes and added a feature request to my SVG Web Stats web application tonight: Now you can switch the timeline graph from Traffic mode to Distribution mode, which shows the share of each browser on my site as a percentage of the total. Read the rest of this entry ...
Via Dion'stwitter, this article about a Universal Edit Button (UEB), the discussion has started to make the rounds. The idea is to make editability as discoverable as syndicatability. Whoof, those are some mouthfuls. Ok, you know that orange feed button you see when a page has a feed? Well this will maybe add a green button for those pages that can be edited, like wikis. Read the rest of this entry ...
