Google recently released its own open-source browser, Chrome, in direct competition to Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Lets see what’s new and different in Chrome and compare Google’s new browser with Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Why Release A New Browser?
Google claims Chrome has been built from the ground up and is more suitable for modern day web browsing as against other browsers which were primarily built for browsing static web pages. Well, not completely. Chrome is being built on WebKit, the basis of Apple’s Safari browser. Chrome however uses a new JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8.
What’s Different?
There are plenty of things that set Google Chrome apart from browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.
Minimalist approach:
Chrome’s minimalist approach means more real estate for the web pages. Apart for a few buttons for navigation there are no menus or toolbars which occupy screen space. Comparison: The minimalist approach of Chrome is at the expense of advance functionality provided by various menus & toolbars in Firefox & IE. And in case you still prefer the minimalist approach, both Firefox & IE let you turn off the various toolbars.
Speed
Most speed comparison tests on the internet seem to indicate that Chrome is faster than Firefox and IE7.
Comparison: The difference in browsing speeds between Chrome & Firefox is not materially significant. It’s unlikely that those few milliseconds is going to make any real difference to you. Chrome does beat IE7 by a huge margin, but beating IE7 in speed is not a difficult thing to do!
Crash Protection
Chrome’s Task Manager functions like Windows Task Manager, and allow you to find processes that are hogging resources or crashing, and just kill that process and the memory block it used instead of closing the entire browser. All other tabs will continue to work.
Comparison: With Firefox or IE, you need to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to abort the entire program. Chrome is a real Winner here.
Address Bar
When you start typing in the address bar, Chrome’s Omnibox offers suggestions to auto complete your request not just based on your history and bookmarks like Firefox does, but also based on the most popular web sites as calculated by Google. You can even search a site from the address bar by typing a site name and hitting tab.
Comparison: Chrome has an advantage over Firefox here. IE does not even come close with its conventional address bar.
Bookmarks
Its puzzling to find an entire toolbar dedicated to Bookmarks in a browser with a minimalist approach. A complete toolbar for bookmarks not only occupies needless screen space but is also inconvenient to use if you have lots of bookmarks.
Comparison: Don’t fix something that isn’t broken. Chrome tries to do just that and ends up on the losing side against Firefox & IE.
Privacy Mode
When you use Chrome’s “incognito” mode, your activities of that session will not appear in your search or browsing history and will not leave any traces such as cookies.
Comparison: Although Firefox 3.0 and IE7 do not have this feature, their upcoming newer versions, namely Firefox 3.1 and IE8 will! Till then, its Chrome all the way if you like to surf sites like….hmm….you know what!
Third Party Add-ons
Firefox’s success revolves around its extendable add-ons and user scripts which allows users to customise their browsing experience. Though the current Chrome beta does not support such add-ons, Google has revealed that Chrome will eventually support third-party add-ons.
Comparison: Till the time Chrome introduces support for extensible add-ons, Firefox does not need to worry much about Chrome!
Other Differences
Chrome offers you a unique personalized home page with thumb-nailed screenshots of the pages you visit most – Quite nice!
Chrome places its tabs above the location bar – Doesn’t really matter where you put them!
Chrome misses out on some basic features like bookmark editing, RSS feed discovery & RSS rendering, sidebars and more.
Compatibility Issues:
For a web developer, Google Chrome is again another browser platform they will have to ensure compatibilities with for web pages. And if they fail to do that, be prepared to face browsing incompatibilities with numerous web sites.
Conclusion:
Are you willing to sacrifice the features and the extensible add-ons of Firefox for a slightly faster minimalist browser? We don’t think you should give up Firefox for Chrome anytime soon.
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