Is Google Chrome better than Firefox?

Like most people interested in the internet or just technology in general, I was very quick to download and try Google's web browser, out in beta, called Chrome.  It came out last week after a comic introducing it to the public slipped a bit early, and since then it has garnered the at lot of attention from all of the usual suspects in the tech news community.  As a result I figured I'd go ahead and offer up my analysis.

So, as a browser, Chrome rocks.  It churns through pages faster than any of the alternatives (IE, Firefox, and even Safari) and offers up an extremely simple "out-of-your-way" interface that lets you get straight to work.  One of the first things I usually have to do after installing a web browser is re-work the toolbar so that it takes up as little screen real estate as possible, allowing what's left to be dedicated to the actual pages I'm viewing.  When I installed Chrome I didn't have to worry about that at all.  The toolbar, including page tabs, takes up around 5% of my vertical screen space, around half of what Firefox uses.  Not a bad start considering Google's approach to Chrome was to introduce a browser that accentuated the pages and applications we use, not the browser itself.

As far as features go there's definitely some interesting stuff going on.  The first feature you'll notice when you try out Google Chrome is a bit of a revolution - new tabs that are actually useful.  In Firefox or Safari if you open a blank tab you get just that, a blank tab ready to go to whichever address you specify.  With Chrome you get a page that shows some tiles for pages you visit frequently - not just links.  So if I go to Kotaku a lot I'll see a small snapshot on my new tab of Kotaku's homepage (along with my other frequently-visited sites).  From there I can just click one of the tiles and away I go.  I wish that you could get a little bit larger preview of the website, but just being able to see everything at once is pretty handy.  From what I can tell the preview is live from the site, not cached, so if there's new content on the page you'll know.

Another one of the more obvious features is Incognito Mode.  By opening a new window in Incognito Mode you're initiating activity that is entirely ignored by the history and cookies.  This poses a deep philosophical question I think - if a web browser pings google.com and there's no history of the request, did it really ever happen?  All that aside this is a pretty cool feature, and I'm surprised it hasn't worked its way into a web browser yet.  It should be said that you can replicate this sort of functionality using Firefox extensions, but having the feature native opens it up to much more general use I think.

I'm sure I missed a lot of features as I've only just begun using the browser, but I wanted to step into some more technical aspects of why Google Chrome is important.  Firstly, it makes each tab in your browser a separate node.  What that means is if one of your tabs crashes you don't lose everything else, just that one tab.  As a blogger who has turned to WordPress' browser editor for writing posts as of late I value this feature immensely.  There's nothing worse than losing a bunch of work in one tab because something else got hung up on some chunk of Java that it couldn't handle and, since a lot of the websites we use today are really individual web applications, it makes sense to integrate cross-tab stability.  After all, in the desktop environment it's not acceptable anymore to have a system crash because your word processor died on you, is it?

Part of the reason that Google Chrome is so much faster than browsers before it has to do with the application threading.  In your more classic web browsers the application is single threaded.  So then, if a web page has some flash on it, some javascript, and of course some HTML you have to wait for each step of the thread to complete before you move on to the next.  Google Chrome is multi-threaded, with each thread designated to a certain function (a javascript thread which ONLY runs javascript, an HTML thread which ONLY renders HTML, etc).  This means that you don't have to wait for the HTML to be rendered before you can move on to executing javascript on the page, and because there's less waiting it makes sense that the pages load faster.

So then, I guess I have a lot of positive things to say about Google Chrome.  Still, there are some negatives.  First off the biggest reason I see for people not wanting to move to Chrome as their default browser is the lack of extensions.  I'm sort of guilty of the same.  For the most part I haven't been a sucker for extensions, and found them to add somewhat trivial functionality to my browsing while simultaneously taking up more system resources and slowing things down.  Then I found the Remember the Milk extension for Gmail.  This extension is very simple and yet it has changed the way I've worked - all it does is add my task list next to my email.  Because a lot of my tasks come from email it's made it easier to manage them as they come.  I think I would really miss that extension if I were to move to Chrome because it's become almost integrated with Gmail to me at this point.  If I go to Gmail in Safari or Chrome my initial reaction is "Wait, where are my tasks?  Is something broken?" before realizing that's a Firefox-only feature.  I'm sure given the nature of Google Chrome and the fact that it's open source we'll see extension eventually, but until then the lack there-of will keep at least some people away.

There's also the "evil corporation" concern.  Google makes their money with advertising, right?  And if they have a browser whose address bar doubles as a search bar it wouldn't take much for them to start monitoring your searches to better place ads.  It's happened with Google search and even their web applications.  How long before they plant that sort of bug in Chrome?  Is it already there?  I'm not sure, like most people I didn't read the EULA.  Still, the concern is always there.

Overall I'd say Google Chrome is, at very least, worth the download.  I've set it as the default browser on one of my windows machines and I have to say - lack of extension(s) aside - I'm liking it.  Plus it's only a beta (given the track record of Google's applications it could be for a very, very long time) so I'm sure there will be many improvements down the road.  I couldn't have asked for a better offering with their first attempt.  For now Google Chrome is for Windows only, but they've assured us they're working on Mac and Linux versions as well.

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