The Google Chrome download link is live. | Hacker News Reader

The Google Chrome download link is live.

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153 pointsptm177 comments

A few miscellanea you may have missed:

* JavaScript is lightning fast. 3x faster than FireFox 3 on the Dromaeo test suite.

* JavaScript compatibility isn't 100%. Fails in RaphaelJS, apparently Facebook and probably more. I'm unsure why.

* The download bar is interesting and different. Opens a bar at the bottom, defaults to Downloads in My Documents. Can drag elsewhere when done.

* It includes sleek a Firebug-esque tag inspector. Right click and inspect element.

* Scrolling up doesn't work on my trackpad. Middle clicking and scrolling up/down doesn't work. I hope this is fixed soon

* The drop-down search bar is neat. Press Ctrl+F to open it. It doesn't work in textareas.

* You can hide the bookmarks bar via Ctrl+B.

* You can drag tabs in and out of the window to form new windows. There's also a lovely animation when you move tabs around.

* There's a task manager for Chrome alone - right click on the main bar and click task manager. 'Stats for nerds' for more info which takes you to about:memory - also shows you memory usage for IE and Opera.

* You can add keywords in the search bar by going to Options, Manage and changing the default keyword.

* Passes Acid2 test. On Acid3, gets a respectable 78/100 on the JS tests, but has a few rendering bugs and linktest failed. Both tests are currently getting hammered - I'm not sure whether this changes the result for the latter.

* You can resize textareas using the bottom-right hand corner

* It includes a spell checker. You can't seem to add new words to it though.

* It supports other search engines other than Google out of the box. It asked me what default to use on startup. It imported my info from FireFox.

* On clicking a link it only changes the status bar to indicate you've done so - other browsers make it more obvious.

* Source is available at http://dev.chromium.org/ - seems to be largely BSD licensed. I haven't downloaded it as it's almost 500mb.

- Does not support RSS feeds - Does not scale images when zooming (like in FF3)

The Tag inspector is a Webkit feature, as are the resizeable text input boxes. Webkit has been getting 100% on Acid3 for a few months now, so I'm not sure why your Chrome install isn't.

Fair enough, but Chrome does inherit them - I haven't used a Webkit browser very much before because FireFox, in my experience, has been a much superior experience on both GNOME and Windows than their Webkit alternatives.

Chrome is using version 525.13 of WebKit, which was just before version 3.1 of Safari, around March.

Right now Safari is on 3.1.2, and WebKit is on version 528.2.

I'm assuming it's because Google isn't using webkit's JavaScript implementation.

Also, who knows when google grabbed the webkit source or when the last time they synced with the main site was.

There's auto-suggest for javascript object names in the Firebug-esque console. Unfortunately you can't drill down into the object as far as I can tell.

Holy shit this browser is fast.

Wow.

True. And fairly polished, too.

Very. I'm very impressed with this so far.

I listened to part of the shareholder thing. I think they said it's been in development for 2 years. That's a long time to stay in stealth mode...

And pretty amazing they didn't have a leak!

Are you sure they didn't? How many Google browser stories have you seen in the past 2 years, and dismissed out of hand?

The splash the pond strategy.

Did you ever see a leaked screenshot, memo or email? Everything else is just rumor or speculation.

Extremely polished.

My only complaint so far is that I miss the bar at the bottom of the browser that typically displays the active link and download status. I find the little pop-up distracting.

If this survives the day without a stability issue it becomes my primary browser.

Looks like they made some minor adjustments for keyboard-only types: instead of a dotted gray box, they highlight whatever item you've tabbed to with a more visible yellow box.

And text boxes are expandable! (Or is this a News.YC feature I missed?)

Edit: Last paragraph wrong on both counts; see response.

Those are features of Webkit, the core browser technology that Chrome and Safari are built on.

Several things about the tab interface bother me: - Double clicking on the tab bar to open a new tab just resizes the window because it's actually the title bar - There is no window menu icon in the top left, so double clicking there doesn't close the browser - Closing all tabs closes the application

It's certainly fast, though, and probably will supplant FireFox as my gmail browser. The tab switching animation is slick too. Definitely looking forward to how this develops. Seems more like a web application browser and less like a web page browser, which is obviously something Google needs to seriously attack Microsoft's desktop monopolies.

Not only does it feel much faster than Firefox/IE, but everything is much simpler. They stripped away all the unnecessary toolbars and menus, and the configuration options are much simpler.

The popular notion is that Google doesn't know how to do UIs. Guess that's not exactly right.

Google seems to live by the maxim "the data is the interface", making their UIs look very staid.

The logo in the title bar is an amazing study in self-discipline. It's a mute color and 13x36 pixels!

mixmax pointed out to me awhile back that even though that's the popular impression, their visual design is actually quite in depth. For instance, he said to consider the difference between the Google front page logo with and without shadows.

It's like it's doing to Firefox what Firefox did to Mozilla. Strip away the fluff to have a slim browser that does what you want. They keep harping on how it's open source and that their great ideas will improve the web. Wasn't that the goal of Firefox (née Phoenix)?

I guess they didn't want to deal with trying to have their developers help fix Firefox. Sometimes, it's just easier to start over.

Thats how these things always start.

... and then people start requesting 'just a couple' of new features.

It'll be interesting to see how plug-ins play out. Google probably does not need to provide the most feature filled browser as a core offering. Providing a simple and highly robust browser is probably more ideal. Do less but be indispensable at what you do.

I see this as a move that forces standards. Google is putting its big shoulder behind increased performance and consistency on the internet. If other people want to wrap the core offering in fancier clothes, I think Google still wins.

Although this is true and good, I really really really want AdBlock.

And gestures and google toolbar!

But this one got all the essential features from the start.

My dad could use this browser without calling me every few days for tech support.

V8 makes me truly happy. This means very great things for web developers.

I like the fact that by default it looks like I always tuned my Opera to look! And it borrowed the home(new tab) page from Opera. Though, on second thought, I turned off this feature in Opera. I hope I can turn it off in Chrome?

Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.

On a P4/2.4GHz with 768 MB of RAM running XP (spare pc). JavaScript Performance Tests - http://dromaeo.com/

Google Chrome - 705.00ms (Total), Firefox 3 - 3303.40ms (Total), Safari 3.1.2 - 3888.20ms (Total), IE7 - Crashed the browser on "base 64 Encoding and Decoding v122" test. It was also very slow on the 1st 2 tests.

fwiw, WebKit (r36053) nightly ran the tests in 794.80ms and the latest FF3.1 nightly Gecko/20080903051823) was nearly double Chrome, running at 1343.40ms

Yeah, the status bar is clunky though.

Phew.. the JS rendering in this beast is wicked.

The JS performance alone might well be game changing. That, plus Google Gears, and Microsoft Office is starting to look vulnerable.

Yeah, I dig it for real. Unfortunately, there are three Opera features that I have come to require -- direction-key navigation among links; mouse gestures for Forward and Back; and named searches* created by right-clicking search fields on sites. If plugins fill these holes, I will seriously consider using this.

* For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on.

Q: It's open source, iron_ball, why not write your own?

For example, right-click the field on dictionary.com and declare that "d foo" in the address bar will look up "foo" using that form from now on.

It's not quite as easy as right clicking the search box in Chrome, but you can still do it by right clicking the address bar and going to Edit search engines. You can manually add named searches there. After the first time you search on certain sites, it will automatically add them as named searches (I noticed this with Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia--you'll see them show up in the Edit search engines area).

I just installed it - and I feel this will be the same experience as when I went from Hotbot to Google way back when. A friend told me about this wicked new search engine, and after having used it once I never used hotbot again.

I have the same feeling about this.

You don't use any Firefox add-ons?

For that reason alone I'm stuck on Firefox for a while. I tried moving to Safari a few months back when they updated webkit, but I needed firebug, greasemonkey, compete etc.

Platform dependence.

More features, you mean. I'm not even gonna bother with chrome when it comes out for linux. I have dozens of extensions & mousegestures alone can't be traded for any number of milliseconds.

Google will try to make switching from FF/Safari/IE as swift as possible, which means they will have to deal with the add-ons. The "Import Settings" thingy is not enough.

Welcome to WebKit, sir. It's always this fast for those of us that use it.

Part of me is a little irked that google is going to get credit with many people for things like "Inspect Element". But it's entirely Apple's fault for keeping Safari so far behind the state of Webkit.

It´s the same that comes with WebKit (at least the Mac builds).

Very nice indeed.

I somewhat agree. I saw little JS performance difference b/t chrome (on XP) and the latest nightly build of Safari (Webkit).

There is a difference and for every non-DOM js benchmarking suite I can find, it's about 3x in favor of V8. It's most impressive.

Its scrolling, both for page-up/down, scroll-wheels and touchpads seems to be set about 3-4x more sensitive than in other browsers or applications in general.

This gives it a nice illusion of speed, but it gets annoying pretty fast once you realize you want to scroll with any kind of precision without needing to have a lifetime of training in FPSes.

I have the same issue. I'm looking now to see if I can adjust it...

I'm running it in vmware on a mac, I don't like how it scrolls. Using the touchpad on a macbook, you can scroll down a pixel at a time if you move slowly.

The smallest quanta I can scroll with the touchpad via vmware running vista is far too large.

I really hope the native mac version scrolls better.

I love it. Can't wait to get it on my Ubuntu partition.

for me it's fast loading lean webpages (like google results pages,) but on most pages i can't tell the difference between it and FF3

on a Blogger operation (hitting the preview button with a lot of HTML in the editbox, which performs some processing on it) FF3 is faster. i don't know what the difference is due to -- guessing string or DOM operations

no noticeable differences with Gmail

There's a report on reddit about poor DOM (specifically innerHTML) performance: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6z9xo/introduci...

*Google Chrome for Linux is in development and a team of engineers is working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible.

It does not work on Linux. :(

the source and build instructions for linux are available. checking it out now, but it will probably take a while on my laptop.

edit: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instruction...

Note: If you want to use a Chromium-based browser, you should look elsewhere. Although many Chromium modules build under Linux and a few unit tests pass, nothing actually runs.

oops. right. shame on me.

Thanks very much.

nothing runnable there, unfortunately. sorry, i should've noticed the "Note:" there.

Its ok, Thanks anyway. I hope Chrome for Linux is out soon.

Haha, incognito mode.

> For times when you want to browse in stealth mode, for example, to plan surprises like gifts or birthdays,

Riiiiight

[Inserting obvious link]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc

...the Internet is for porn!

Think it's worth it to open up the executable in a hex editor looking for strings along the lines of "pr0n mode"?

No need to open up the executable, the source is available, it should be trivial to grep it.

Pretty swell, but I won't ditch Firefox just yet...I can't do without Firebug, so I'll have at least one FF window, at least during working hours.

(This comment posted via Chrome)

It has a javascript debug/console window that is pretty neat. It has auto completion as well. Go to the page menu item, then the developer menu item.

I recommend using the WebKit inspector, it is actually pretty comparable to Firebug (and in Chrome).

*edit: whoops I hadn't refreshed for a while and I didn't realize this was already answered.

Check out the "Google Chrome Terms of Service": anything you post or transmit with Chrome can be used by Google in any way it wants, for all time. They can display your writings in public, modify it, or both.

This applies to everything you transmit using Chrome, no matter how private it may seem, no matter if it's encrypted, no matter if you're sending it to friends, family, lovers, business partners, employers, financial services planners...

What was that slogan? "Don't be evil"?

"11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

"11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services."

It is strange that up to now there have been virtually no comments about privacy issues in this thread. It is clear to me that for a company in the advertising business the prime reason to release a browser is to improve data mining.

If, say, an association of insurers generously releases a "free" browser, would people install it?

From what I can tell, there's a way around this nonsense: use Chromium instead of chrome. It's licensed under the BSD license.

http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html

On the other hand, two-dozen third party software packages are distributed with Chromium, and all are released under some license.

Total turn off. Off...

How hard would it be for FF add-ons to be ported onto Chrome? Is Google going to offer add-ons?

I was disappointed that it doesn't seem to offer support for user scripting a la greasemonkey. It seems like add-ons might be intentionally discouraged:

'The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. "As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you're always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken," Fisher says.'

--- http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome

That does /not/ say that add-ons are discouraged, merely that they chose to make a browser on their own because current add-ons (and backward compatibility) would restrict their power if they had chosen to revamp current browsers.

Everybody's really fond of their add-ons (I couldn't live without Tree Style Tabs), so either Google will implement them to grab more market share or hackers will add them.

Some JS tests:

http://www.celtickane.com/webdesign/jsspeed2007.php http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/speed_test/index4.html

Needless to say, it's fast...

Notice Chrome is slower in the first test because of the AJAX declarations. But honestly, who is going to be worried about the speed of AJAX declarations? Look at this comparison:

Chrome: Array object 131 Date object 30 Error handling 7 Math object 13 RegEx object 52 String object 41 DOM 51 Ajax declarations 295 Total Duration 620

Opera: Array object 172 Date object 47 Error handling 31 Math object 47 RegEx object 109 String object 63 DOM 31 Ajax declarations 62 Total Duration 562

If we assume Google can get AJAX declaration down to 62ms just like Opera (which seems perfectly reasonable, I don't imagine they had those in mind when considering speed), ten that would bring Chrome's execution time down to:

387ms!!

Assuming it can get a few more milliseconds down (it is after all only in beta stage, now that it's been open-sourced I can imagine a good couple of improvements will stream in), that means it's 1.5x faster than Opera! (which is hailed as the absolute king of Javascript execution)

Also, Opera does some kind of caching thing I think. On some of the tests (like Array and DOM), Opera consistently scored eiter X or 2X (e.g., 90, or 180). There is no way there could be a 2x speed difference just out of thin air like that, so I imagine it's some trick that notices when it can be sped up. If Chrome did that it could have the speed gain as well.

Who want's to bet this browser will catch up to and get more popular than firefox? It's sleeker, looks smaller, yet does the same stuff.

It's also a hell of a lot faster... among those who care about this sort of thing, this definitely is going to be the browser of choice.

This is a really big deal.

The one thing it doesn't have at this point?

Extensions.

I'm guessing there are plenty of people who will dig the browser, but without the bells and whistles provided by extensions, many users won't switch.

I can live without AdBlock/FlashBlock, since I don't frequent many sites that have heavy third-party content, but as I said above, I can't live without Firebug right now.

In the presser, they said an Extension API is forthcoming.

The first thing I thought when I saw Chrome was that they want to stop/override programs like AdBlock for their search ads.

If that's the case, I go to filtering proxies at my end.

Oh yeah! I forgot about those. Now I can use Opera. Well, I could if I used Windows. Any auto-updating filtering proxies for Linux?

http://www.proxomitron.info/ was the old standby

That would be the most ridiculous reason they would want to develop a completely new browser for.

Not necessarily. AdBlock is the most popular extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1/cat:a...

440,000 people download it a week. That's a lot of people not even seeing their search ads!

Well, not sure I'm ringing the bells yet. I think as people play with it, they'll see there's still a long way to go.

The biggest is that it doesn't do extensions yet. It doesn't The first focus sounds like it will be the Flash engines of the world (i.e. binary extensions). Then later they'll add a Firefox-like extension model.

Next they have their other OS's to support. So it's got a lot of catching up to do.

I'm impressed with it so far, but I'm not uninstalling Firefox quite yet.

Extensions on firefox are broken anyways. Look how difficult it is to find and add an extension. I'm thinking less than 5% of firefox users actually use extensions, but I may be wrong there.

If google makes extensions work better, the have a real winner. And firefox will die quickly.

The "create application shortcut" on desktop thing is truly revolutionary and could change the way people view web apps.

I agree. All the other elements are more "checkbox list" items, but this really adds to the daily use experience.

There is a download link right on the Google homepage now.

http://www.google.com/

Direct download: http://dl.google.com/update2/installers/ChromeSetup.exe Wine bottle it.

Worst implementation of bookmarks yet. I have over 5k of them and managing them in Chrome will be a futile process. Clicking the "Open all Bookmarks in New window" button also crashes the browser when you have that many.

It is nice and fast though.

Are you trying to index the entire web in your own bookmarks?

In my opinion the bookmark implementation is the BEST yet. You essentially can have multiple bookmark menus for different topics, as any folder you drag onto your bookmark bar becomes a pulldown menu.

I think this falls in to the 'best for what?' category. Bookmarks are something that gets used differently by different people.

Some freaks (no offence) with thousands of bookmarks have radically different needs to others.

I think Google might have Mozilla beat on intuitiveness of the UI.

The UI design is a step above! Bravo to Google! This is another way that this browser will contribute by stepping up the competition a notch.

Another example: When the browser window is maximized with multiple tabs, there is no space wasted on the title bar!

No Mac version. :(

not yet... have heart.

Have any of you Mac folks tried it virtualized to see how it feels?

Ran it here virtualized. It crashed twice right away but has been going great since. It is really fast.

Running it here... very snappy, the only shame is having to look at Windows XP fonts which are really ugly.

Roll on the mac version.

Can you guys run it through http://dromaeo.com/ ? Curious to see how it performs virtualized on a Mac.

Running in an XP Guest on OS X 10.4 with VirualBox on a 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook gives 283.00ms (Total).

On the same system, running in Safari 3.1 in OS X gives 2749.00ms (Total).

Ran it on XP in Parallels. Installed fine, ran fine. Ran fast.

How does it compare to webkit? I'd find out for myself, but chrome isn't out yet for any OS that I use.

Running SunSpider, Chrome is faster in Parallels than native Safari, but native WebKit is faster than both.

Coool. Do you know if it is possible for Chrome to remember the font magnification for visited websites? In FF, I usually enlarge website font, and FF remembers my choice. Chrome doesn't do this automatically.

I need adblocker plus!!

that's the only feature i am sure you will never see on this browser

There will be an extension API. I'm doubtful they'll blacklist extensions. I also doubt Google is worried about the extremely small minority of power users that are blocking ads. So you'll never see ad blocking built in, but I'd bet there will be an extension for it.

It's open source, and ad blocking is the #1 requested feature of browsers. There's probably a reason why it isn't baked in to start, but it will get added.

There's always one isn't there...

Wow. It comes with a javascript/dom debugger ... it seems roughly on par with firebug.

And the task manager is amazing, exactly what I've been wanting.

(all the good stuff is under the Page menu, then the developer submenu. Took me a while to find).

The "stats for nerds" page is also good entertainment (available from the task manager or by typing about:memory).

Not only will it tell you where all that memory is being used (Chrome isn't exactly lightweight), but it will also spy on IE and Firefox and let you know how much memory they are using.

The JS/dom debugger/inspector is from WebKit.

Sad that no one really knows what's going on with WebKit.

It doesn't appear to support proxies during the install process.

Yeah, this is a major bummer. How are we corporate-folk supposed to test? C'mon, Google, give us a regular installer like the rest of the world.

This has now been fixed. Thanks, Googlers.

What do you mean ?

Are you using the standard Windows installer or the buildbot waterfall ?

It also defaults to whatever language locale google decides you should have, with no option to change it.

Apart from going back to the download page, and explicitly choosing it there, and then downloading the download-installer which respects that software should be in English.

No, English is not my first language, but Jesus christ things like this pisses me off.

Yes I am also a non-native english speaker but I prefer english on my software or at least the choice.

I love that you can drag browser tabs from one window to the other. That's just crazy cool.

So can Firefox.

Can't pull a tab out of firefox to start a new window, though. That's something I tried to do a few times because it seemed like something you should be able to do.

So can Safari.

Any idea why it installs itself in "C:\Documents and Settings\User Account Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"?

Vista needs you to elevate permissions to install to Program Files.

This is from one of the devs in an "off-the-record" QA session here: http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?id=17826898#itemanchor_1782...

Guys its rock solid and AWESOME. I just love it. Rock and roll time. I am running john resigs dromaeo on it. Lets hope for the best. Cheers!

Dromaeo results http://dromaeo.com/?id=20571 Check it out. A lot faster than FF and Safari. I am not counting IE here...IE is outdated with the launch of Chrome.

ff: 1403.60ms

chrome: 393.20ms

leaving a browser that already felt fast in the dust: priceless

Looks like they're making an offensive move towards Silverlight. The Silverlight plug-in loads but the way in which Silverlight loads content from the web looks like it is broken. Anyone else get past the "Loading showcase" label here: http://silverlight.net/showcase/

Or else they just didn't make supporting Silverlight a priority of the initial release.

I wondered how it would handle an infinite loop of javascript alerts, so I wrote a little script to test it:

http://www.paulbutler.org/projects/chrome/test.html

It passed! I'd be curious to know how Opera and Safari do on the test. I have a hunch Opera might pass it.

If you want to test the GC in Javascript, try out an infinite loop of unreferenced allocations. Generational GC should be able to handle this without breaking a sweat.

Actually, I wasn't trying to test the javascript VM at all, just how the browser handled an infinite loop of alert dialogs. Since alert windows steal focus, an infinite loop of them will keep stealing focus. I wanted to know how Chrome would handle this.

I didn't think you were barking up the wrong tree. It's another suggestion. You might need some kind of "yield" statement if you want to see how another Javascript program will act with a background window spamming it with allocations.

That seems to somehow crash my chrome tab after it shows the alert?

Opera has a check box on the alert which allows you to disable scripts. So I guess it passes.

I'm really diggin' this browser. My favorite feature has to be the 'Incognito Window'.

The browser is amazingly fast, clean, well-designed (great Omnibox) but the comic-book-style explanation... really? That little digitomb took away whatever load-time I would have saved the rest of the week.

The interface is very sleek.Speed is awesome. But font rendering is really bad.And where is the Tools,View menus? Wont be my primary browser for XP.

Fonts definitely need some attention from a graphics person. My company's intranet time reporting app looks like it was re-rendered by a techie -- the fonts are small and seem to be designed as bitmaps with no eye to anti-aliasing. It's much more functional, but it looks like crap.

I never thought I'd say "hurray" to yet-another-web-browser, but Google hit it out of the park with this one. Hurray!

Does not work at all on my computer (Vista). It starts up OK, but I get a window saying "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click OK to terminate the application." whenever I try to load anything.

http://screencast.com/t/pY0dgFVCLr8

...but now it just works after a restart. Googling around seems to suggest that was a .NET related problem.

Is it just me, or does spawning a new process per tab - which makes perfect sense when the tab contains an actual web-app - seem like overkill if it's only to read a document?

That said, if Chrome provided some equivalent of Live Bookmarks, I'd reconcile myself to the profligate process spwaning.

Some small pieces...

1. The plugin interface to adobe doesn't seem like it's quite there just yet. I had some significant slowdowns with trying to get to other tabs and with responsiveness.

2. There were a few cases where new tabs didn't seem to load in the background... has anyone else encoutnered this?

One thing I'd like to see is to be able to embed some of the Google Gadgets from iGoogle into the new tab screen, down the bottom would be nice.

Would useful to be able to keep up with email/rss/news incrementally while I'm doing normal browsing, rather than having to go look for it.

Anyone know which icon is Chrome using when it makes app shortcuts? For my site it used favicon but it definitely used a bigger icon. I've looked at Gmail's favicon.ico file but it's not a multirez one.. it's just a plain little 16x16 icon...

* Very clean.

* Speed I didn't notice any difference yet.

* I miss the Firefox upper right corner search bar.

* Not crashing the whole browser when one tab crashes is obviously very good(why hasn't this been solved before? has been a problem for so long and a very obvious one too)

Nice. The simplicity is OK, I never use the menu bar anyway. Still, I love my FireBug, the EULA sucks and there's no noticeable speed difference with Firefox on my machine, honestly. Back to Firefox.

Nice. The simplicity is OK, I never use the menu bar anyway. Still, I love my FireBug, the EULA sucks and there's noticeable difference with Firefox on my machine, honestly. Back to Firefox.

I wonder how they will expose functionality to extension developers and if that will even be possible.

I didn't stick to Opera nor Safari after Firefox due to lack of support for some plugins I use and wrote.

This is pretty close to extraordinary. This thing is pitch-perfect. It's like the best parts of Firefox and Safari and Opera merged. I can't wait for this to come out for the Mac, now.

Hm, Chrome doesn't seem to fill the _charset_ hidden input. Interesting, whether it's just that the feature is not yet implemented, or they don't consider it to be useful/good.

The combined search/address bar is great -- the best ideas are often so obvious in hindsight (likewise for gmail's email organization)

EDIT: and the "new tab" button is in exactly the right spot

I really liked it until I got blue screen of death. And of all sites it was one of the official Google blogs.

I couldn't reproduce the crash, but now, there is this lingering feeling ...

Fast, clean interface but no way to send a link, no highlighting of search terms, redundant delete icon on every tab instead of one on the side for the tab in focus.

Interesting information can be found at the about: page.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

I'd like the ability to tag bookmarked pages. Right now the bookmark tool is too limited to be useful. I'll continue to have to use del.icio.us

Looks like it doesn't run in Wine, guess I won't get to try it out until I go back to work tomorrow.

try this: ctrl-f, enter something (say, firebug) and then take a look at the scrollbar. Nice.

please, allow extensibility in this, like firefox, and I am ready to say goodbye to Firefox!

Boy, does it rock :)

I'm writing this from Chrome and I must say it's clean, fast and pretty darn cool :)

Can I haz Firebug in Chrome plz?

Webkit's Web Inspector is there, which I know is not Firebug, but I mention it in case you didn't see it.

does Webkit's Web Inspector allow you to view dynamically create DOM elements like Firebug's Inspect tool?

It seems to flow nicely. I can inspect dynamically created elements by right clicking on them, where in FireBug somehow the link kept getting activated.

I also like how it computes the styles, but I'm not sure how to track down the computations. However, these are all my falling-outs. The browser works nicely.

Although, Shockwave Flash just crashed while listening to pandora and using the webkit inspector. Related?

OMG. The speed.

about:memory

Copy-paste of my reddit response.

Not saying it's all bad, and I realize this is a first release, but if Google wants to avoid the "MS Vista" stamp when it comes to software-making they might consider fixing up the following points:

1. Downloading the "installer" doesn't download the complete software.

2. Installer presents everything in Norwegian, with no choice of English. I want my software in English, end of story. There is no way to select English, so for now I assume this is based on some Windows locale-settings which I will just configure properly after install.

3. Configuration hangs to the point of me almost killing the process. After eating a few minutes worth of 100% CPU time, Chrome launches. No feedback is given during this period that it is actually working on anything at all.

4. Once running, Chrome is still in Norwegian mode.

5. Options (or "Alternativer") shows no way to select a English UI language.

6. The language-pack seems to include a spell-checking. This entire text-box is filled with red lines. Because this is not written in Norwegian.

7. Scrolling trough this small text-box proceeds to scroll down the entire page when I reach the end. With what seems like 200 lines of scrolling per millimeter on my laptop touchpad, this renders the scrolling area basically useless for edits. This also applies to page-down in textboxes. Very, very, very annoying.

8. Scrolling in general scrolling seems way too fast also. Like 2-3 pages on what should be 1.

Out of the box this is not something I am happy with, and this needs to be improved about 100 times from second 1.

A few simple choices (like language) must be added. Better reporting to the user that something is actually being worked on needs to be present. Configurability is shit. It has a task manager for web-page tabs (i.e. "geek stuff"), but wont let you configure basic stuff like if opening links in new tabs should activate them or not.

I'm going to have to uninstall this now and try to get hold of a English version.

Edit: The language thingie evidently can be fixed without reinstalling. I just couldn't find it with the non computing-standard language used in the options dialog.

Edit 2: Now I find that google search always presents me the Norwegian version, not the english, when searching from the url-bar. Despite having "I want google in english" cookies firmly set.

This is bloody annoying. Stop forcing localization on me damnit!

None of the issues you mentioned happened to me.

I run windows with location set to Netherlands and language to English. I got Chrome in Dutch.

Fixing language: Options -> tab:Minor Tweaks -> button:Change font and language settings -> tab:Languages

Fixing spellchecker: see language

Fixing search: impossible.

I wouldn't care about the localisation if it did things right and followed my language setting.

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