Google has released a new browser called Chrome. I have test run it for the last day and it’s a reasonably impressive offering. It seems designed to be a forerunner for the development of complex web applications - it has a seamless interface with Google Gears.
It lacks the add-ons and extensions of Firefox 3 and it is unclear at the moment what the plans for such things are. It has been developed using similar software to Apple’s Safari but is only available for windows at this stage.
It has a wonderfully simple interface and looks minimal and neat on the screen. There is not a lot of clutter in the design yet most functions are self-evident and easy to find.
The address box is the most interesting innovation, combining both a place to enter URLs as well as search terms. Based on your browsing history and Google search a number of options will appear in a drop-down list - you can choose to go straight to a URL or go to a Google search page. You can also determine what your default search engine will be if you don’t like Google search.
The pages load extremely quickly and from what I can determine, most sites render very well using this browser.
It will be interesting to see where this browser will fall. I suspect it’s designed more to take market share from Internet Explorer than from Firefox. Google will be appealing to those who use IE pretty much as is. That market doesn’t really want to use add-ons and wants a browser from a brand they trust. So it’s just possible that Google are onto something here.
It also depends on their plans for web applications. If they can tie Chrome into the package for web applications then they might just make some significant in-roads into Microsoft’s browser market.
And beyond all of this, I think it’s good to have another serious player in the browser market to drive innovation. So between Firefox, Opera, Safari, Microsoft, Chrome and a few others we should see some interesting developments in the world of browsers over the next couple of years.
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