Being a web developer I usually test my sites on the Big Two browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox) and then do a passing test with Opera and Safari.  Normally if it passes IE and FF then it will pass the other two, but not always.  And then this week Google released a browser of their own called Google Chrome.  Damn, now I’ve got another browser to test.

You’d assume that the guys at Google would be pushing standards and trying to toe the line but instead they’ve kind of gone off in their own direction.  They’ve completely rewritten the JavaScript engine in order to try to clean it up and they’ve eschewed most of the conventions we’re used to seeing in our modern browsers.  Gone is the dedicated search bar with a dropdown of sites, gone is the traditional window frame (both header and footer), and gone are any regular menus.  Turns out I don’t miss them that much.

The ‘Omnibox’, as it’s called, is Google’s answer to searching, bookmarking and url entry.  It works pretty well.  Just start typing and chances are that what you meant will appear in the dropdown.  I do miss the ability to set up my own search engines but I have read that Chrome is supposed to intelligently detect search forms upon the first visit to a site.  It hasn’t worked exactly as described so far, but it IS only a beta.  IMDB worked well but hockeyDB didn’t.  I read somewhere that a Wikipedia search just required a ‘w’ before your search term but that didn’t work for me either.

People everywhere were upset that there were no add-ons or extensions.  To be honest, I think it will take developers a while to figure out how they want to implement them in the new window.  In Firefox I had several add-ons that ran in the footer of the window.  Well, now there is no footer.  Um, ok.

The Find function (CTRL+F) in Chrome works very well.  On par if not better than in Firefox.  This is one place where Microsoft just can’t seem to get it through their heads that searching text should be subtle, fast and really simple to use.  Chrome’s Find shows you the number of matches, automatically highlights all of the hits in one colour and highlights the first hit in a different colour (and allows you to loop through the hits).

Bookmarking works fine.  I’ve read complaints about it being sparse but it seems just fine to me.  History leaves a little to be desired but I really rarely go searching through my history to begin with.  I’m a bookmarker and will temporarily bookmark pages if I think they may be interesting later.  The Internet’s too big to think that just one site will have all the answers (er, I mean, any site but this one).

My main complaint would be the speed.  All of the reviews I’ve read have raved about the speed.  In my own very unscientific tests I’ve found that the speed is hit and miss.  Some pages, like Google (as you’d imagine), are rocket fast.  Others, particularly long pages or pages with images, seem to load in pieces and take a considerable amount of time.  And Flash ads seem to lock it up for a period of time as well.  My best example of the periodic lockups would be the Reader’s Digest crossword.  It’s a timed crossword so keystrokes should be responsive but in Chrome the page lockups up and buffers the keystrokes every now and then.  When the page unlocks the buffer flushes and I end up in seemingly random places in the game.

All told it’s easy to see the Big Two becoming the Big Three.  My colleagues think it’s not ready for prime time.  I already use it as my primary until there’s a page it can’t handle.  I don’t really know how you can revolutionize a product with such a basic premise (show a web page and get out of the way) but it seems the guys at Google are trying.  As long as they don’t start pushing ads into the browser – this is Google, by the way.

(Oh, and it ends up being a pretty big download through an exe.  Man, I hate those kinds of downloads.  My buddy Brian called it a bait and switch.  Yeah, it stings when the download is listed as 800kb and then you run the file and it starts downloading again, for a long time.)

Update:  The Find function in Chrome is awesome!  Not only does the Find work as you’d expect it to, it also puts a little indicator in the window’s scroll bar where each find hit appears on the page.  You have to see this on a long page.  VERY useful.  Very, why-hasn’t-it-always-worked-that-way?