If you've been around the technology traps for a while you might remember the debates that centred around whether Google would ever develop its own operating system and provide some serious competition to Microsoft. Well, Google is ten years old now and its finally making that push, although it's not quite what we anticipated. Chrome is the latest entrant to the browser wars and it's a serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. How can a new browser challenge Microsoft's market power? Well, to see that we need to look a little more closely at Google and what it offers.

Brand Power

The word "Google" has become synonymous with searching in much the same way as "hoovering" means vacuuming and "xeroxing" means photocopying. However, Google now offers a full office suite, email, online scheduling, maps, research tools and a plethora of other applications.

These can run in any web browser and derive revenue for Google through ads that promote products that are related to whatever's on your screen at that moment. The operating system all of that runs in is a web browser and Google figures that making its apps run better by providing its own browser will have you use its products
more and increase its revenue.

However, we don't only use our web browsers to avail ourselves of Google's products and services so we've road-tested Chrome in a couple of different environments. One is a home computer and the other is a system in a large business where there are corporate firewalls, security policies and the like to contend with.

Under the Covers

Chrome is developed from an open source framework called WebKit. It's the same platform on which Apple's Safari is based and Nokia uses it for the web browser on many of their mobile phones. In contrast, the increasingly popular Firefox is based on the Mozilla framework. Internet Explorer began its life as a spin-off from Mosaic but has since evolved to use Microsoft's COM framework.

Installation

At first, Chrome looks to be extremely svelte with the initial download weighing in at less than 500KB. However, that's merely an installer that connects to the Internet to download a more complete package. We assume this is Google's way of making sure you install the latest build of Chrome as it's still in beta testing. By the way, many of Google's services — even Gmail — are still in beta. The version of Chrome we tested was 0.2.149.29.

Having downloaded the software and installed the application, the first thing Chrome does is migrate your settings from the other browser on your system. If you happen to have more than one other browser installed it asks which browser you'd like to move your settings from.

On our home system, all of this just worked and we were up and running in a few minutes. With our corporate system, we encountered a small problem. The environment we tested it in required use of a proxy configuration script. For some reason, Chrome didn't like the script so we had to manually configure the proxy settings. It wasn't a big deal but it does have the potential to frustrate. The proxy and other connectivity settings are accessed from Chrome's menu system but they actually open the same settings dialogue as Internet Explorer.

User Interface

The first time you start Chrome you'll notice that the screen is remarkably clear. The one area on the toolbar can be used for entering URLs and search criteria. Google calls this the "omnibox". For example, entering "www.melbpc.org.au" will go to the Melbourne PC User Group homepage. If you enter "Melbourne PC User Group" then Chrome will use Google's search engine to search for the web. Unlike other browsers that have separate areas for searching and addresses, Chrome simplifies the interface by using the one area for both purposes.

Toolbar buttons are minimal, with the default set limited to forward, back, refresh and tools. In other words, as much of the screen as possible is focused on browsing with extraneous clutter removed.

The default homepage is quite clever as well. Somewhat similar to Opera's Speed Dial, the default Chrome homepage dynamically updates with thumbnails of the sites you visit most frequently. This appears by default on each new tab that you open. Interestingly, each tab launches a new instance of Chrome. This may seem a little inefficient but it means that when you close a tab, you reclaim all of the memory it was using as it's effectively an instance of the Chrome program that's being terminated.

If you download a file, the download manager appears as a small status message at the bottom of the screen. Expanding it opens a new tab in the browser, with a list of all your downloads. You can launch files directly from this tab.

Finally, when you click a link on a web page that's meant to open in a new window, it opens as a new tab adjacent to the current tab. This is a feature that's found in some other browsers that we particularly like as it helps us to stay organised when we're opening lots of new web pages.

Performance

When browsing with Chrome the first thing that struck us was its speed. Quite simply, Chrome felt really fast. We cleared the cache on Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9 and
Firefox 3 and launched www.theage.com.au from each. Chrome's performance was sensational with The Age loading in just five seconds. By comparison Internet Explorer 7 took about 8 seconds. However Chrome wasn't any faster than Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5.

We tested Chrome with our preferred Internet banking provider, ANZ, and found that it worked perfectly. We're not claiming that it'll work perfectly with every
bank but it was fine for us.

As Chrome is in beta it's not surprising that it's not perfect. It lacks compatibility with Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight and we found that its ability to render some sites was limited. For example, we had trouble using the popular social networking site Facebook. While that site in particular may not be of interest to everyone, it's indicative that Chrome isn't quite right yet.

Java compatibility is possible but will require some work to download and then enable it for Chrome. We'd expect Java support as well other popular web standards will come as Chrome matures.

Security

Given that we spend so much time using web browsers these days it's important that they're secure and protect us from potential nasties. Chrome's pop-up blocker worked well with a discreet notice displayed in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

One area of concern is that downloaded files can be executed by double clicking them. However, there's no warning that you're about to do so. This means that a malicious site could potentially trick you into downloading a bad file. Once on your system you could launch the file from within Chrome and it would launch without any message warning you of danger.

Like many version 1 products or beta releases we don't think that Google Chrome is ready to be our one and only browser. There are still some rough edges to be sorted, but we see great potential. Perhaps by the time you read this, Google will have already released a newer version that addresses some of the issues we found in areas such as site compatibility and security.

Note: Anthony Caruana©  Permission to copy or quote extracts from this article may only be done with the written permission of the author.

Reprinted from the October 2008 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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