And the good stuff doesn’t stop there because they also released this awesome music video! Always a sucker for these upbeat dance tracks I really dig it and somehow find the slow-mo editing (or whatever they call that) strangely exciting. By the way, this effect looks especially great on the background layer with Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda) who is mesmerizing even when she is not dancing so hot.

I am completely going to rant about Chrome and some other stuff in below but I strongly suggest you check out what I like to call The Chromic to learn more about what makes this browser unique. It does not matter if you visit that link now or later but please visit it. It is a wonderful example of how to make otherwise pretty dry and technical stuff easy to digest for a wide range of users.

Why Use It?

You know what? Despite all of the good reasons I wanted to list why somebody should use Chrome over, say Firefox, I cannot. To be honest, the main reasons why I am using it right now are:

• It is new
• It looks sexy

And maybe, on a more work related level:

• It is from Google
• I want to verify all the claims

Now those last two might be reasonable but frankly I do not think all the really good stuff matters for the typical user. I hate having to use a term like typical user to describe the sort of person I imagine but it will have to do. If you get excited by the following Chrome features then you are most likely not a typical user:

• A brand spanking new JavaScript engine
• Gears is included
• Each tab runs in a separate (OS!) process

And the shiny sweet stuff. A lot of people will be excited about this:

• A nice blue minimal chrome (window)
• No ugly main menu (yeah!)
• The omnibar (intelligent address bar)
• A quick loading and useful start page
• Incognito mode

There is no real bookmark management. That is most likely a feature that a lot of users will miss but I think the whole bookmarking thing should be scrapped anyway. You really should use social bookmarking services for that. Google should either obtain an existing one or cook something up and integrate that with Chrome. Everyone hail Google Links.

Driving a V8

V8 is the brand spanking new JavaScript engine used by Chrome. It is supposed to be extremely solid and fast. As a user, I don’t find the average browsing experience is really enhanced. I even started using more exotic G applications to find out if that would make a huge difference but frankly they run just as well on Firefox. Other script-heavy sites always ran pretty well on Firefox too so there is no real reason to switch.

As a developer I think some of the techniques behind the V8 are cool. It is also nice that we can just use it, investigate the code and host it in our own applications. It is also strangely heartwarming to see that some Smalltalk influence has found its way into the most talked about application on the web. I evangelize Smalltalk at every chance: there are too many ignorant fools.

People Without Gears Are Losers

Gears is excellent stuff for developers. Using Gears, almost any web site or application can be transformed to new heights. Unfortunately, developers can not depend on Gears being available universally for a good long while. This means that we have to develop downgraded applications for the next few years anyway. All because of the ignorant horde that does not have Gears installed. Fuckers they are. May the smell of dog shit forever surround them.

Chrome comes with Gears. You don’t even have a choice. Unfortunately for us developers, the ignorant fuckers who do not yet have Gears installed are exactly the same turds who are the last ones on earth to download Chrome itself. There’s no real gain there until Google starts pushing Chrome harder down the throats of those bastards.

Separate Process For Each Tab

Now this is the killer feature of Chrome. It transforms it from a mere browser to the struts of an operating system for the web. Again, from a developer perspective this is all pretty exciting stuff but for the average user it will mean shit.

Let me ask you this: how many times does your browser crash? All the time? Frequently? Better check your computer then. Every few days? Again – this is not normal. I usually format at this point and start from scratch. Look, every program has the right to crash every once in a while when you ask it to do something strange but if something starts crashing again and again then somewhere, something is wrong.

With Chrome running each tab in a separate process this means that only one tab will fuck up and the rest of your browser and tabs will still be usable. It’s like running multiple programs in Windows: when one of them fails miserably you can just close the motherfucker and be done with it. Unfortunately, in the Windows world it just doesn’t really work that way and you eventually have to reset anyway whether you like it or not. Chrome proposes to change that perspective, for web applications at least.

Interlude: Stop Treating PDF as HTML; it is not

One of the use cases I can cock up right now is with PDF files. Browsers tend to choke on large PDF files every once in a while. First they have to load that motherfucking huge Acrobat monstrosity and then there is this 200MB PDF file which some asshole forgot to properly prepare for consumption by wire.

Then suddenly your whole browser is fucking around in limbo because it is trying to download (and open at the same time) that big ass PDF that some fish fart is hosting on his soon to be dead university server. Unfortunately, your average fuck of the milf browser will try to do this within the same process in which all of your other open tabs are running so they will be pulled into the deep too.

This is where Chrome is different because every tab will be it’s one process. Like running multiple Firefox instances in one cozy window – or chrome. Thanks to Chrome I can just give it a good curse or two and comfortably close the tab while I happily continue browsing Wikipedia, looking at some crazy ass’ YouTube upload and listening to some stream at Last.fm all at the same time without worrying about anyone of them going down and taking down the rest with them. My life is complete.

The Goods

Ironically, the chrome itself (the parts of the window) is very minimal. There is only the window with borders, control buttons, a little Google logo and scrollbars (if necessary). In contrast to most Windows applications, there is no main menu. The tabs are the main parts of the program. They contain an address bar, familiar URL control buttons and two extra buttons which give access to almost all of the program’s functionality.

Tabs can be smoothly dragged in and out of the host window to another Chrome window or an empty space on the desktop. In the latter case it will promptly create a new Chrome window to host the orphan tab. It all animates nice and smooth and even though all this is not really that useful, it is all strangely rewarding to execute just for the fucking eye-candy.

The omnibar is pretty useful. Although not explicitly stated, the name holds the premise of being able to type anything useful and get what you want (like Firefox’ Ubiquity or a more intelligent “I Feel Lucky”) but currently it is most useful as a search of your history, URL or just a Google search. It works well within these limits. The parser is good and I suspect that a lot of people will be able to get some good mileage of of it. However, I don’t really see what the big improvement is on the new and improved location bar in Firefox 3.

As for the incognito mode, I wanted to say that it is shitty useless but I guess it is useful when you are stuck to browsing porn on someone else’s computer. When you are incognito your browser history and cookies and are not persisted. So when you close the window it is as if you browsing all that filthy shit on your mom’s computer never happened. And no, in case you were wondering, I never browsed such shit on my mom’s computer. That computer was mine – it just happened to be in her house at the time.

Finally, there is the start page. This is a thing of beauty. However, even though I am a great fan of the recent file menus in most applications, I cannot really seem to get myself to use it. Usually I will just Alt-D to the address bar and type in either part of a familiar URL or a Google search. Nine out of ten times I do something similar when I start up Firefox and there is no real reason to change.

I like both my hands on the keyboard and my focus on a command line (yes, I am aware that my hands and focus on a girl will almost always be better but I am talking about keyboard v.s. mouse – computer mouse here). Grabbing the mouse to point to something on the screen is just so primitive and something I really can do without. Unfortunately the majority of the users do not share this opinion but simple reasoning will suggest that they are stupid monkey balls.

The Byes

This post originally started out as another Chrome hype but after two paragraphs of hype there was no more. After deleting those paragraphs I tried to think about Chrome in a more structured way and eventually there was enough to start ranting. I am using Chrome as we speak as my main browser and it works great.

For me, there is only one important thing that is missing and that is a clear orange feed icon that is displayed at the right edge of the address bar when the website publishes a news feed. Firefox has had this for a pretty long time and I absolutely rely on this feature to aggregate my feeds. A lot of sites publish feeds of various categories but do not make this immediately clear on their pages. Usually the information is there, invisibly, for the browser to pickup but unfortunately Chrome can not do this yet.

So there you have it. I am not even going to say that you should download it or not because I am just not sure why someone would want to use Chrome instead of Firefox. I will give it a try for a few weeks and hopefully they will have that one missing feature (feed discovery) in the next version. If not, I will be very angry.