Browser Roundup Series:
Overall, chrome is made up of a variety of 3rd party open-source components that Google has cobbled together into a workable browser.
The result is a very clean, elegant, and sparse user interface on top of a very capable rendering engine.
Chrome may look simplistic and spartan, but there is plenty of elegant power and subtle complexity behind each and every one of those features. This is the mark of true software mastery... features so well designed that you aren't even consciously aware of how complex or advanced they really are.
Even Apple will have to be quite impressed by the slick nature of the Chrome UI --perhaps a little jealous since part of Chrome uses the open source WebKit, which also powers Safari.. I haven't really used Safari on the mac platform, but Chrome sure beats the shit out of Apple's Safari for Windows (Safari for Windows sucks so bad, I'm not even going to review it).
One thing about Chrome is the speed. It is really snappy. Quick to open, quick to respond to mouse clicks, and quick to load pages. I'm impatient and I open new pages and tabs like a fiend so this really appeals to me.
Google has re-thought some of the more basic assertions about the browser UI, but without straying so far from the familiar that it would alienate experienced users.
The most obvious example of this re-thinking is in how Chrome handles tabs. Instead of a browser that contains tabs, Chrome has tabs that contain browsers. The tabs are at the top. Within tabs you have your toolbar (if you enable it), the address bar, and whatever web page you might have opened. This is a subtle distinction, but if you take a little time to examine how this affects the UI's behavior you can see that a lot of thought went into the idea.
Another obvious thing is that the address bar doubles as a search bar... this is not new (IE has had this feature for about 10 years), but it works much smoother than in other browsers and is much more intuitive. Typing pops-up the expected auto-complete window, which is quite similar to that found in any other modern browser, but Chrome manages to put a lot into this pop-up with less noise and a lot more appeal.... plus it includes search results, bookmarks, history, feeds, etc. right in the same pop-up. Again, nothing really new, just a slicker and more streamlined take on an old favorite.
Chrome is also exceptionally very well animated, giving subtle but very important visual cues to the user about what is going on, where, and why. Instead of just "popping into existence", new tabs slide into position. Drag and drop operations are smooth and intuitive, but more importantly dropping things is very smart... Chrome just seems to magically "know" what you want it to do when you drag/drop something.
The Chrome rendering engine is fast, smooth, and most of the pages that I've viewed have work perfectly and look really good. While it isn't quite as awesome as Firefox's rendering engine, it is so very close that I usually can't tell a difference in the quality at all.
Options and settings in Chrome are also sparse, but it has some of the friendliest settings editors that I have ever seen. Even rookie end-users will find it very easy to change settings without being overwhelmed with techno-babble. Power users might wish for a few more options, but all the really important stuff is there.
File downloads are handled elegantly using a status bar like display at the bottom that shows progress and details about you downloads (it is almost exactly the same as the very popular "Downloads Progress Bar" add-on for Firefox). I do have a major complaint here though... the download bar is embedded within the tab where the download was initiated. When you change tabs, you can no longer see status on downloads that are taking place within other tabs. I would much prefer if the download bar was part of the overall instance of the application so I could monitor all my downloads no matter which tab I'm in.
The major thing that is missing is a comprehensive system for managing 3rd party add-ons, but as far as I can see there aren't any add-ons yet anyway. It does have support for plug-ins for flash, acrobat, etc. but nothing quite like the add-on gallery for Firefox and or the new accelerators and web slices in IE 8... but I'm positive that we'll see this side of Chrome very soon.
Another missing feature seems to be support for RSS feeds. If it is there, it sucks... but as far as I can see it doesn't do anything with RSS at all... I sure hope that's on the top of their "to-do" list.
Overall Chrome is a welcome entrance into the newly competitive browser landscape. It lacks many of the advanced features you might be used to from other browsers, and end-user customization is very limited in the beta. But what has been delivered out-of-the-beta-box is still amazingly well done.
Add-ons will keep power users on Firefox for a while, but Google's biggest competition will be from the new, and much improved, Internet Explorer 8... which has so many of the same features as Chrome that it is almost creepy! I wonder who is copying who here?
Still, I've only had this thing a week or so, but I find that I am using it more than any of my other browsers, and I am really enjoying the speed and simplicity quite a bit.
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