The Google browser - Google Chrome

[red-e-made]

This comes out later today. For Windows only, so far, but it's open source.

As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries. ... On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

Here's a more detailed explanation.

Thoughts?

[Ookami]

Excellent idea, I'm going to keep an eye out for a Linux release to test it. Good on them for choosing WebKit, I say.

[red-e-made]

http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/

there is a deb file there so us linux users can try it
works fine on mint and its quick
regards

Holy crap, thanks!

[red-e-made]

OK, I've been trying out CrossOver Chromium, and I have to say my first impressions are pretty positive (although sadly, the celebrated easter egg didn't work for me - all I got was a blank page). There are some minor things that weren't working right for me, such as the way fonts are rendered sometimes, and it couldn't import my bookmarks. Your browser and download history can be cleared manually, or you can go "Incognito" (which is a very cool feature) - more on that later. It did crash a few times, but like Firefox, fully restored tabs. The biggest plus is, it loads pages fast as hell - you can also set it to do DNS prefetching, and it uses a whole let less memory than FF3.

I like the tab on top of the browser window, and it searches Google for webpages as you type key words. It's got that Opera-style Most Visited Sites display going on, too. In the upper-right corner, the document button corresponds to the File menu on FF, and that wrench corresponds to Preferences.


One thing that's pretty cool is if you right-click on the browser and select Task Manager from the drop-down menu, you get to see the processes running in that tab.


Clicking the "stats for nerds" link displays processing information of the tab on the webpage itself.


If you click the File icon and select "New Incognito window", this is what you get. I'd add that in my experience, setting the Options to blocking all cookies and insecure content, pages still loaded quickly and without a problem:


If you click the Preferences button, this is your menu. The fonts on the buttons didn't load well:




I noticed it uses SSL 2.0, as opposed to the SSL 3.0 that my FF3 browser uses. Seems SSL 2.0 loads faster, but is it less secure than SS: 3.0?


Apart from a few minor bugs (that might even have been due to incompatibilities on my end), I'm pretty happy with it. But until it can take care of the crashing - which is significantly more prone to happen in Incognito - and import bookmarks, it's not going to be my default.

[red-e-made]

well it is running in wine .. so if you browse your wine drive and put your bookmarks in there.. then goto import bookmarks and point it to where you placed them on your win drive and bingo you have your bookmarks

regards

Er, no. Let me be a bit more clear as to what happened in my experience.

Going to Preferences and selecting "Import bookmarks and settings" gives you a window that asks "Import bookmarks from" with only one option: "Microsoft Internet Explorer". I don't use Explorer, so I don't know if this bookmark importing would work if I did.

Again, it's a fine browser for the most part, but I'm not manually inputting 30+ bookmarks. Also, the crashing in Incognito is a bit of a turn-off.

[curt_grymala]

I'm going to give this a shot and see how it works.

On my Windows installation, I've actually taken to using Chrome more than Firefox, so I'll be interested to see how it performs on Linux.

The main thing I like about Chrome is the amount of screen real estate you get. The chrome of the browser takes up as little space as I can imagine is possible with a browser. The fact that it automatically starts searching Google (rather than just searching your history) while you're typing is a nice feature, too.