Anybody know anything about this?

tanstaafl.

There's this: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
...or this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/02/google_browser/

Personally, I agree with Ned Batchelder: It'll end up taking market share from Firefox, rather than IE.

Very interesting. I like what their goals are for the browser.

For me, personally, they're going to have to duplicate (or make "gears" available) for all of my Firefox plugins before I could switch over... but I'll certainly try it out.

I will try it out, but, to me, "starting over" means abandoning JavaScript altogether. Writing a faster JS interpreter and making it the core of everything in the world seems like a band-aid to me. Fixing the shittiness of the web, to me, means getting rid of JavaScript as the lingua franca, not trying to make it suck less.

That said, competition usually leads to better software. Let the games begin.

I'm okay with JavaScript -- you need some way of specifying behavior, and it's an entirely reasonable programming language. About the only thing I'd change in JavaScript, itself, would be to add visibility features (public, private, etc.) and maybe some modularity features. I believe this sort of thing is part of the ECMAScript 2.0 proposal, which may or may be going anywhere.

Where things get ugly is the API for interacting with the DOM, with remote servers, with other frames in the browser, etc. That's something that could stand to be completely overhauled.

What's intriguing to me about Chrome is that it's running each page in a separate OS process. That's good for stability, but I'm wondering how they do cross-process communication. You want to keep a single cache, a single cookie database, a shared network services, etc.

I have to agree, I have written some very decent code and complex in Javascript. It it interacting with the DOM where it gets nasty.

Get it now
http://www.google.com/chrome

I should have been more precise in my criticism.

The language itself is indeed "reasonable", but you can't separate the language from the infrastructure that's grown around it. My point is that, if you're going to go in and overhaul these things, why not go the whole nine and start pushing for client-side Python, Ruby, or any of the other languages that are traditionally used to develop the back-end applications serving data to the browser? The only reason developers use JS is that it's the only wheel in town for AJAXy web apps, and that there's a massive library of existing JS code out there to steal from. But are those good reasons to stay with it?

This looks like a good first step...

"Sign up to get news about development for Mac."

It's real purty so far.

Can't compete with Firefox until it does the stuff my plugins do, but, it's purty. And fast.

The developer tools are pretty as well

Running in WinXP under Parallels and it is really fast. Shame it currently doesn't work with iPlayer, which is currently my killer web app.

Unsurprising, but

It's very fast hopefully they will add some more features to it.

I have successfully watched bbc iplayer using some random free uk proxy

I'm not seeing a huge speed increase overall. It seems to be loading some parts of the pages I'm going to quicker, but the overall time is just slightly shorter.

There's a slight possibility that I might use this browser in conjunction with Firefox. Seeing as my whole life is in Google's products, I could see this as being my "Google services browser." I've already set my homepage to be my GMail inbox, and I might just set it to open Google Docs and Google Reader upon launch as well.

I just don't see any way that such a simplified browser, as appealing as that is, could replace Firefox for me. Even in the above scenario, I'd have to give up the extensions I use for Google's products. Like one that puts Remember the Milk in my GMail inbox, and another really great extension for Google Reader.

I'll certainly keep it on my machines, and see how much utility I get out of it over the next couple months...

Mmm... I wonder how much of one's browsing actions and history get uploaded to google's servers whilst using this tool ?

Hopefully not much, if any.

That was my first thought also. There was a dull uproar when it was announced that gMail was going to be skimming email to do the targeted ads. Now people are willingly just giving them all kinds of data by using their online tools (spreadsheets, organizer, word processor and now a browser). There is a whole wealth of data to be mined by them now.

Why is there a double standard when it comes to Google and when did them not being an evil company change?

Until they change the EULA, you're giving Google the right to use anything you do via Chrome...

As for actually using Chrome, I'd hold off until they release the first update at least. They're using an old version of WebKit and its vulnerable to that file download trick. Even if it didn't have that I'd wait to see if there were any other issues or bugs. Let the rest of the world be the guinea pigs on this one...

That is the part that bothers me. People will always complain when something invades their privacy (like the books you check out in the library), but for some reason let Google do it with open arms (such as the books you read from Project Gutenberg or whatever). It is just baffling to me.

Huh?

The EULA looks like the generic Google one so its worded assuming that you're using one of their webapps. I hope that they change it to one specific to Chrome which chops out that part at least.

Looks like the EULA has been changed so that may cheer folks up, however the speed increase is not measurable for me, and combining that with the lack of plugins, I'm out.

Firefox 3.0 solved a lot of the speed and memory issues, so I agree that Chrome isn't going to win me over on those points. But some of the niceties are tempting, such as resizable text areas (I know, supposedly a firefox plugin can solve that for me) and the nice way it handles the difference between searching for a word and surfing to an intranet site of the same name.

If they can start implementing decent plug-ins, it'll definitely give firefox a run for its money.

What would be truly awesome if if they can somehow give Firefox plugin developers an easy path to Chrome plugins. Something where you can take your existing Firefox plugins and easily convert them to Chrome. I think at this point that would be the Killer App.

Those problems are better, but still exist on slower computers. On my old work laptop, which is a 1.7GHz, 1GB machine, Chrome is noticeably faster.

Flipping keyword.enabled is one of the first things I do with a new FF installation. I hate that autosearch crap.

No XUL maybe?

Somebody else said that the paint delay is basically 0 for Chrome. You can or used to be able to tweak the Firefox one as well.

See, I'm the opposite. I prefer to type my searches into the location bar. I love having that bar be both my search bar and my URL bar at the same time. Usually I'm searching for a term that involves multiple words with spaces between the words, so I can simply type the search into the location bar and up comes the google result.

What I'm saying is how I like Chrome's way of handling it so that it makes my already-ingrained behavior even more useful, making it so that I could even do the same with a single word search term.

Yeah.

A quarter-second is pretty long. Maybe I will tweak that.

I solve that problem with Bookmark Keywords. I set one up so I can just type "g search term" into the URL bar to search Google. My way is more advantageous in that I can set up a variety of searches from the URL bar: IMDb and Wikipedia are also frequently used. I also get rid of the search bar.

Edit: I just tried Chrome to see what you were talking about. I don't like it. The simple fact that pressing return might go to a web site in my local domain or do a search for the term, based on criteria I don't know (and even if I did know, wouldn't (want to) take the time to process), makes it bad UI.