As of quite recently, word of Google’s new browser, Google Chrome, has made its rounds of the internet, inspiring both hype and hatred. What’s so special about Chrome? Well, see for yourself. Don’t bother wondering if Chrome is a good browser; it is. Don’t even bother asking if it’s better than Firefox, because, well, it’s really hard to say, and it’s not even an important question. The real question is whether Google Chrome is going to be successful. How much of the browser market will Google control by the end of this year? 1%? 10%? 50%? Right now it’s hard to say.
On the surface, Chrome doesn’t feel much different from our beloved Firefox 3. Sure, it looks a little funny (and very blue), but it handles much the way any normal browser does. It has a phishing/malware blacklist, just like Firefox, a download manager, tabbed browsing, and a “smart” address bar that does everything under the sun.
Chrome does sport a couple features that set it ahead of Firefox: multiprocessing for tabs, a super-quick Javascript virtual machine, and a task manager. So are people going to be leaping out of their chairs to download Google Chrome? Or will it sputter and die because Firefox is “good enough” for most people? I managed to convert my mother from IE7 to Firefox 3 not by telling her how much better Firefox is, but by telling her that you don’t have to put up with any crap in Firefox. That is, she was converted not because Firefox is so good, but because it doesn’t suck.
So I feel like much of Google’s potential market for Chrome is already taken and unwilling to make a change. Why should someone want to change from one perfectly good browser to another that they’ve never used before? Multiprocessing might seem neat to us techies, but to average Joe it’s not that important.
In light of this, we have to wonder how much effort Google will spend advertising their browser. Harry McCracken asks a good question:
Just how hard will Google push Chrome on the Google homepage? Like no other company on earth, Google has an opportunity to get hundreds of millions of people using its browser in a relatively short amount of time. You gotta think that it’ll use the Google homepage to drum up interest. But will it check to see if you’re using IE, Firefox, or another browser and attempt to convince you to switch?
Currently, the Google homepage displays nothing at all related to Chrome (Edit: Nevermind, it’s up there now – 9/03). Of course, hype has done a significant amount of advertising for them (sounds hypocritical, but I’m a Google fanboy, so I don’t mind).
I’d love to report on Chrome’s performance in the Acid2 and Acid3 tests, but they’re either down or operating very slowly right now, perhaps because everyone thinks like I do. Edit: Chrome seems to pass Acid2 and scores a 79/100 on Acid3.
Chrome Acid2 Screenshot
Chrome Acid3 Screenshot
