Holy shit this browser is fast.
Wow.
Wow.
The logo in the title bar is an amazing study in self-discipline. It's a mute color and 13x36 pixels!
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.
... and then people start requesting 'just a couple' of new features.
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.
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.
Very nice indeed.
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.
I have the same feeling about this.
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.
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.
And text boxes are expandable! (Or is this a News.YC feature I missed?)
Edit: Last paragraph wrong on both counts; see response.
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.
* 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?
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).
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
Phew.. the JS rendering in this beast is wicked.
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.
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.