Here is what my son has to say...........
I have been playing with Google Chrome throughout most of today (while not fighting fires with C#, SQL Server and K2), and thought it might be worth recording them for posterity.
For those who have been either living under a rock, or have some sort of life, “Google Chrome” is the long rumoured web browser from Google. It has been in development for the last two years, with the first public beta being made available yesterday.
It didn’t dawn on me at first why Google should do what they have done - but after discovering two or three key features of Chrome, everything started to fall into place. It’s worth saying right here and now that Microsoft are probably very worried indeed.
* Google Chrome uses tabs just like any other browser - but it assigns each tab it’s own process internally - meaning that one web page cannot crash the entire browser (or at least that’s the theory). Given the time we invest in content authoring within the browser - GMail, Wordpress, Google Docs - this is a very good thing.
* Google Chrome has an entirely new Javascript engine. The dynamic language that modern websites use is becoming a bottleneck, and the engineers at Google realised this. Websites are slowly becoming bigger and more complex - so having a browser that can run them up to 1000% percent faster means the goalposts have been moved. Sites will start doing more, because the browser can handle it.
* Here’s the kicker. Google Chrome has a menu item called “Create Application Shortcut”. This makes an icon on your desktop specific to the webpage you do it from. The resulting window that launches when you click the icon looks for all the world like a Windows application… except of course it’s Chrome, running a website. Think about it. Sandboxed web sites, that look like applications.
I am impressed with Google Chrome. For a beta, and a first version, it is fantastic. What’s more, the entire browser, rendering engine, and javascript engine are fully open source - so you can see how they did everything and even use elements of it yourself if you really want to. Chrome also has Google Gears built in - meaning supporting web applications continue to work when you disconnect the machine from the internet. Very clever.
I’m sure Steve Ballmer will put out a press statement rubbishing Chrome over the next day or two, and then privately start screaming at the Internet Explorer development managers. It’s not going to be pretty.