For those of you who are looking for Google’s next big launch, it just happened. Google Chrome is out in full force and I’ve got my first impressions.
First of all, the browser is beautiful. It takes out all of the crap (menu bars, bookmarks) and hides them within the interface. Want to head to your favorite site on “Nintendo”? Just type in Nintendo and your site will pop up, no matter what the URL. You even have to tell it to manually add the home button, just in case you’ve never used it on Firefox or IE.
My one complaint, however, is that (just like most browsers), Google’s browser has styles built in that provide structure to the site. While a padding here or a margin there may not be the end of the world for a normal site, highly-specialized sites may not like the formatting that Chrome throws in (just like it doesn’t like the formatting that IE throws in).
The main juiciness in Chrome is not what it looks like, but how it runs. Whereas most browsers are single threaded (allowing one part of the site to run), Chrome is multi-threaded. If there’s a hefty javascript that needs to be ran on-site, the rest of the page will load first and the javascript will fall into place when it’s done.
Against Firefox, sites look very similar as far as rendering goes (minus the “browser styles”). There are no other major issues, which is phenomenal for a beta. I’ve been surfing for about 20 minutes with no slowdown (something I would occasionally get with Firefox).
On the flip side, Internet Explorer 8’s beta 2 released today. I upgraded from IE7, and a funny thing happened. Every site that I put my “PNG Fix” javascript will now not show those .png images. That means that (once again) I have to go fix my code to work with Internet Explorer.
What that means, however, is that the new IE should natively display transparent .png images. I will have to do more research to test, but here’s to hoping.
