Last week Google finally made their bid for a share of the web browser market with their newly launched Chrome browser, leaving web developers a little exasperated about the prospect of additional browser compatibility testing work. However, for the rest of us the question is; can Google’s latest effort really offer anything new that Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and others don’t? And if so, can it really go a step further and take users off Internet Explorer or will it simply be the preserve of a small web-savvy minority?
(N.B. the current available Chrome version is a beta one, free to download, but limited only to Windows XP and Vista users)
Starting first with the actual features of the browser, it has to be said that it doesn’t attempt to offer anything drastically different or new. Having said that, it does have a few neat touches that might edge its nose ahead of the pack.
Google are most excited about the home/start page which rather than being a pre-specified particular site is instead a springboard for managing surfing – with links (and thumbnails) of all your most visited sites displayed in the main window. This is a useful feature and allows you to keep track with favourite sites without having to visit them to find out if updates have been posted; the small thumbnail on the main page refreshes with new content if available.
The start page also features a useful bookmarks bar at the top of the main window, which allows for quick access to popular sites, and is probably slightly more convenient than using Firefox’s bookmarks system. The bookmarks bar can be turned on and off with a handy shortcut (Ctrl+B) and, along with the aforementioned start page features, is probably the most striking initial feature.
These smart new features are slightly undermined by the fact that there is no ‘home’ button on the main interface. This makes it far more awkward to return to the main start page (featuring the snapshots of ‘most visited’ sites) than it should be. Why the button was omitted seems quite a mystery, as I very much doubt I was the only one who found its absence unhelpful.
One quite noticeable advantage Chrome has over its competitors is in the size of the main browsing window, especially if the bookmarks bar is turned off. No matter how much I simplify my Firefox or IE interfaces, the control bars and buttons always encroach far more into the main window that with Chrome.
All in all Chrome seems to offer a pretty handy browser option, and promises to only get better as the beta release is tweaked. The ‘kill the tab, not the browser’ feature, whereby page crashes impact only the individual tab rather than the whole browser, also appears to be quite a sensible solution to one of the more frustrating problems of tabbed browsing.
Ultimately Google’s current offering has more than enough potential to compete and hold its ground in the browser market – but since it offers nothing radically different from the other available options (of which there are already perhaps too many) then it is hard to predict what its level of success will be.
Microsoft’s IE curerently holds nearly 80% of the browser market, with Firefox taking most of remaining 20% (Safari, Opera, Camino and Flock all hold a relatively negligible share). Despite Mozilla’s success with Firefox it has always struggled to win users outside of the small minority of web-savvy types who are both aware that alternatives to IE exist, and care enough about the features on offer to actually download and use them.
Google’s brand power is certainly far greater than Mozilla’s, not to mention the huge difference in potential advertising budgets and marketing operations. Despite this however it seems hard to see how Chrome can break the IE dominance with no way of effectively rivalling Microsoft’s distributive position. All in all it is probably far more likely that Chrome will establish itself as a major alternative browser (like Firefox for example), popular mainly with quite web aware users.
Google hopes that its browser will help build a cohesive platform from which to unite current Google services and launch new ones. Whether they can persuade casual users for whom all browsers are pretty much the same (and who invariably use Windows which comes pre-loaded with IE) to make the switch is the hurdle they must overcome to achieve this. The challenge seems pretty immense but it will be interesting to observe Google’s efforts to do so in the coming months.
Dejan Levi