2010: The Year of Chrome?

With the New Year now in full motion, and Google Chrome recently releasing version 4 to it’s stable channel for all users, I felt it was time for a brief recap of recent events and experiences.

With the release of Version 4 to the stable channel Google has brought a good amount of fixes and improvements, but the main feature to be talked about here is extensions.  While the bleeding edge dev channel users have had this for about a month or so now, hitting the stable channel means that extensions are going ‘prime time’ for all users.  I feel a bit silly using the term prime time to describe that Google Chrome just released the extensions system to all of it’s users now with the stable channel, given the fact that in just a few weeks time there are already over 1,800 extensions as of the time of this writing.

Before I go on, I must mention that Firefox just had it’s 3.6 release.  I myself am an avid user of Firefox, and have been for a while now.  The Firefox 3.6 release is yet another solid Firefox build, with speed improvements, feature enhancements, etc.  Despite all the greatness, one big remaining issue I have with Firefox — and to be fair, most other browsers — is how it’s designed.  What I mean by that is despite the under the hood enhancements, and most importantly (IMO) tabbed browsing, today’s modern web browsers really haven’t evolved as fast as the web has.  The web has changed drastically in the past 12 years or so since going mainstream, but how much have our browsers changed with the web?

Granted, completely redefining the web browser experience is much easier said than done, and I certainly do not claim to have any idea on how to do it.  That said, what can be refined a bit easier is the browsing experience on the back end.  As this relates to the browser design I mentioned, web pages now are more complex than ever before, and we have web applications to boot.  Combine a dozen of these or so into a browser split into a dozen tabs, but still bound to just one executable process running in the background, you can have a recipe for disaster.  If one of these web apps or complex pages stalls your browser, then it starts to impact your whole browsing experience by slowing you down, or worst of all, crashing the entire browser and all it’s subsequent opened pages.  As for my personal experiences this still occurs to this day, under Firefox 3.6, and it frustrates me to no end.

This brings us back to Chrome.  Chrome splits each tab into it’s own process in the background, which while leading to higher memory usage overall (which isn’t a problem on modern systems), results in much faster overall performance, especially when coupled with the powerful webkit web rendering engine.  For all the love I have for Mozilla, I have to say I absolutely love this methodology of browser design, at least on the back end.  If one complex web application decides to stop working, then you can just deal with that one web app / tab, and not have to worry about loosing your session, or restarting your whole session over again.

Recently, although I’ve been pleased with the Firefox 3.6 beta releases, but frustrated with the overall back end design, I’ve been trying Google Chrome as my primary browser.  This is especially true once the extensions first hit the dev channel late last year.  I’ve installed about 15 extensions, trying to replicate as much functionality as I can that I had in Firefox.  Although there are some great extensions, because Chrome is so new, and the extensions themselves were just released, I don’t feel that it is currently possible to ‘extend’ Chrome to the extent that Firefox can be through it’s own addon system.  That said, it certainly is comparable to at least the core functionality of what some other browsers have through native, or extensible features.

I will say that the browsing experience is fantastic.  The browser starts up fast, renders pages fast, and does nearly everything faster than any other browser on the market currently.  Of course there are various benchmarks and articles that prove this through numbers, bar graphs, etc., but actually experiencing this first hand really leaves the impression of using a superior piece of software.

However, sadly not all in the ‘Kingdom of Chrome’ is sunshine and rainbows.  Outside of the extensions themselves needing a bit more understandable maturity, and the Chrome API itself that could be loosened up a bit more for developers (not allowing devs to change or extend the core browser tabs is a perfect example), there is one deal breaking bug that has prevented me from making the change to Chrome as my primary browser.

I am still trying to understand the root cause of this issue completely, but basically it starts with clearing your cache.  I’m the type of guy that clears my internet cache after every browsing session, usually automatically on browser close.  Now, doing this in Chrome results in strange behavior where upon relaunching the browser multiple extensions both loose their settings, and act as if it was the ‘first run’, meaning I get bombarded with pages welcoming me to the extension and explaining the functionality.  After further digging it appears that this happens specifically when the cookies are cleared, meaning that at least some of the extensions are storing their settings within the browsers cache.  Now, this does not appear to the fault of developers, but rather a deficiency in the browser itself that needs to be addressed.  Luckily, this is a known issue, and an issue that appears to be on the docket to be fixed for “Mstone-5″, which I am assuming is Chrome 5 (technical details on this can be found here).

With all of this said, regardless of this deal breaker bug, and the additions that are needed in the Chrome API for developers, I think everyone can agree that the progress the browser has made in a relatively short amount of time late last year once Chrome 4 builds had extensions is amazing.  1,800 extensions in a few weeks.  That is a sign that this is not only a great browsing platform, but the developer community is also willing to embrace Chrome.  I’m sure that things will only get better for Chrome as long as Google continues to work on the areas that the browser still needs to grow in — of which I have no doubt they will — and by 2011 we may be very well saying this was the year of Chrome.