Armchair Theorist

During the last 24 hours, it seems that everyone and their neighbor has something to say about Google’s new open source web browser, Google Chrome.

I have blogged about my initial observations on Chrome yesterday, but today I finally had the chance to download Chrome and try it out for one full day.

Here are some of my quick follow-up thoughts, in Christmas carol format:

5 awesome things about Chrome

1. The speed improvements are as good as advertised. Even when the page is loading slowly due to network effects, somehow it doesn’t seem as slow as in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
2. The new V8 JavaScript engine is wicked fast. For most sites, this may not matter much, but Chrome really shines when you are using heavily AJAX-ed applications like Google Reader or Gmail.
3. The “Create application shortcuts…” feature to run any web page as a desktop application with no browser controls is really cool.
4. The multi-process architecture brings browser stability to a whole different level. I forcibly closed a chrome.exe process using my Task Manager, and only one tab is terminated without affecting anything else. And even then, the tab will suggest to you to reload the tab if you want to try again.
5. The Omnibox will take some time getting used to, but I do agree that the intention of using the Omnibox to provide an integrated and universal browser “command prompt” is the correct approach.

4 things I can do in Firefox that I can’t do in Chrome

1. Block advertisements using my Adblock Plus add-on.
2. Access my delicious bookmarks using my Delicious Bookmarks add-on.
3. Highlight some text from a web page and right-click to have the option to: a) search for the highlighted text on any of my search engines (not just the default), or b) open a new tab with the highlighted text as the URL (enabled by my Context Search add-on and URL Link add-on, respectively).
4. Post content directly to Evernote and vi.sualize.us directly using my Evernote add-on and vi.sualize.us add-on, respectively.

(There’s actually a whole lot more, but you get the idea. )

3 things Chrome absolutely must implement to have a chance at being a IE/Firefox-killer

1. A way to support extensions or add-ons like Mozilla and Firefox. Look, Firefox is not a perfect browser. But because of Firefox’s add-on framework and the hundreds of add-ons available in the community, users can tweak and extend Firefox close to perfection. Chrome absolutely has to support extensions if it is to be taken seriously as a “prosumer” web browser. If extensions are not possible because they compromise Chrome’s security model, at the very least Chrome must provide a Greasemonkey-style capability for users to do scripting. Anything for people other than Chrome developers to customize and modify the browser’s capabilities. Yes, I realize that Chrome is open source, and theoretically anyone can take the source and make improvements to it. However, I would bet that a whole lot more folks would be capable to do scripting or plug-in development than to hack on the actual Chrome source code.
2. Built-in mashup capability. Internet Explorer 8 has Web Slices. Firefox has Ubiquity. Chrome has … ?
3. Integration with other web browsers. How about the ability to right-click on a link and have the option to launch that URL in Internet Explorer? How about being able to drag and drop a Chrome tab onto Firefox and have it launch in a Firefox window, or even better, dock directly into Firefox? The former should be trivial to implement. The latter may sound like fantasy, but if you remember Google’s close relationship with the Mozilla Foundation and the fact that there are Mozilla developers on Google’s payroll, then it may not sound so far fetched after all.
4. (Bonus) Export bookmarks. This feature is so blatantly obvious and simple to implement that I’m shocked that it’s not available in Chrome. I find Google Chrome’s Help Center entry on this matter very telling. Either they a) do not expect you to ever use any other web browser once you switch to Chrome, or b) they fully expect you to continue using your other web browser while you are giving Chrome a test spin.

This feature is not available at the moment. If you imported your bookmarks from another browser, your data should still be available in the original browser.

2 ways I’ll be using Chrome in the meantime

1. Desktop launcher for my most commonly-used web applications. That includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, and my Wordpress control panel. Any application that is JavaScript-intensive and pretty self-contained will be a good candidate for this. As Steve Hodson puts it, there are just people that prefer certain applications living on the desktop as separate entities.
2. As a toy and a testing ground. Unfortunately, that’s it for now. It is not ready to replace Firefox as my default web browser… yet.

One final opinion

Google Chrome is not going to destroy Microsoft or desktop software. Let’s just get that out of the way first.

If you have been reading commentary in the past 24 hours on what Chrome means in the epic struggle between Microsoft and Google, you would think that Google Chrome is the key strategic piece to displace Windows and put everything in the cloud.

Not so fast. I would bet that after five years, folks will still happily run desktop applications just like they have happily been doing for the past decade or so even as we see the Internet become mainstream. Google may have grabbed 1% market share in a single day, but it will not crush Firefox much less Internet Explorer.

Yes, Chrome is a strategic piece for Google, but perhaps for different, less ambitious reasons, as many others have suggested.

Here are three possibilities:

1. As a web company, Google needs to put its stake in the ground in the way web standards and technologies get adopted and implemented, and the easiest way to do that is by being a web browser vendor. If your web browser gets enough mind share and/or market share, you get a certain influence in how web standards get developed and adopted by websites.
2. As David Mullings commented in Facebook on my earlier blog post, Google may be using Chrome as one of their entry points in collecting data to benefit DoubleClick, AdSense, and their other services which can benefit from behavioral targeting. And as TechWag noticed, there are just some things that don’t seem right with Chrome’s EULA. Well, looks like Google has updated their EULA.
3. Google really just wanted to flex its technical muscle to the industry and placate their developers who have been dying to prove to the world that anything Google does, it does it better than the rest of the world. For publicity, for morale, or for ego - take your pick.

See Also:

• 5 Observations on Google Chrome
• No Firefox of Search? I’ll Settle for the iPod of Search Instead
• Why Adobe AIR is not Ready for Enterprise Deployment