After just 100 days, Google has lifted the veil of betaness off its web browser, Chrome, by releasing version 1.0. When Chrome made its first public appearance earlier this year, it was met with positive reveiws due to its JavaScript performance, as well as its robust multithreaded model. Now that the beta label has been ripped off Chrome, Google can’t hide itself anymore: Chrome will now have to take Firefox and Internet Explorer head-on.
In the blog announcement, Google explains that the road doesn’t end here. Chrome may have reached version 1.0, but a lot of vital functionality is still missing.
We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome, the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches, so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days.
The company also explains that the beta period helped in fixing and improving specific areas of the browser. Plug-in performance has been improved greatly, in addition to regular speed improvements. They also delivered better bookmark management tools, as well as improved import/export tools.
Google Chrome 1.0 for Windows is available, versions for Linux and Mac OS X are in development.
Best browser out there by a long shot. I have been waiting for chrome (a slick browser with webkit rendering) for a few years now, and haven’t used firefox as anything but a container for firebug since chrome came out.
best browser out until Opera 10 final comes out
I used Chrome almost exclusively for a month. It has, without a doubt, the cleanest interface for a web browser that I’ve seen (at least since the days when I could customize the Mozilla suite to my liking), and the ability to run websites as an “application” with an even tidier interface is a novel approach.
I ended up switching back to Opera for the time being because Chrome had a nasty problem of freezing up for a few seconds when it was loading flash apps. Not really noticable until you have a lot of Youtube tabs open, then the browser would slow to a crawl. Opera also has the benefit of storing my information on a remote server, which is nice because I have access to the same bookmarks and speed dial here at the university as I have at my apartment.
Still, kudos to the Google team. For awhile I wondered if this was going to be another “perpetual beta” projects that never saw completion. Hopefully by now the Flash problem has been fixed, since Youtube is a huge asset of Google. More choice makes all of the browsers better in the long run.
You must live in Windows. Safari has the most clean/minimalistic UI of them all. But then again you can use Safari, albeit disjointed on Windows.
I’ve had this problem with FireFox, when I click on certaint link, the browser stay loading for 2 mins (like youtube links), It only works if I re-click on the link, with Chrome this problem is not there, I’ve tried with the latest beta of FF 3.5 and the problem remains, I just hope Chrome can get extentions as quickly as possible.
Actually I had a very similar problem with Firefox. As it turned out, it was not Firefox at all, but instead was my router. Once I upgraded the firmware, the problem went away.
But why the problem is not present with Chrome?
I was just trying to figure this problem out as well. On BeOS Firefox would delay after loading any page other than the home page ( which I could navigate FULLY ) for up to a couple minutes.
The problem turned out to be that my system was setting my local router as the DNS, whereas I could set it further out in my extended network or use my ISPs DNS directly. This fixed the problem quickly.
Thing was, I could use almost all other networking tools without glitches, but noticed problems with two different IRC apps.
The exact cause of this, I cannot discern. It may have to do with how a network request is made, which would make sense why the platform mattered ( happened on BeOS & Haiku, but not Ubuntu, Vista, or MacOS X ).
Oh well, check your DNS – and set it manually ( I use the fastest OpenDNS servers I can find, bypassing all local DNS servers ( but not the DNS cache ) ).
–The loon
This is because the Firefox GUI is single-threaded. The plugin uses the same thread as Firefox and when it has a hard time loading the movie from youtube it hogs the thread.
Considering that Chrome wants to isolate everything to separate processes I guess they’ve done that with plugins as well, which means only the plugin gets stalled.
So to sum up: If you ever plan to do some heavy lifting, single threading things are not the way to go.
I really like the concept of Chrome, and it’s always nice to have another open-source / another competitive browser in the browser “market”.
I definitely see some potential benefits in its technology. I’ve also heard a lot of people discussing it; they seem to like it. I’ve been waiting to try it myself as well (for day-to-day browsing) because Chrome certainly looks very promising.
The only problem is that I can’t actually install it, run it, or use it on my (Debian) computer.
It is very nice of Google to bring out their first release, but I really hoped (kind of expected) that they would have released some sort of (beta?) non-windows version by now as well.
Since i’m using Debian I feel a little bit “left in the cold”. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Chrome functioning on non-Microsoft Desktops as well?
Non-windows users have yet to receive their first beta builds, and those would be.. just beta releases :/ .
i hear ya
WebKit for GTK+ is coming along, as well as for Qt. Google put its efforts into the Win32 port of WebKit since Apple made it possible for it’s own business interests.
Still no word on a ‘nix version. And yes I know about Chrome with wine. I’d just much rather run it natively.
I think it might actually be broken on the latest wine builds. The native version is coming along, even if not as fast as a lot of us would like. If you check out the current source, it’s actually possible to build a barebones native client. The rendering’s a bit off, no tabs or configuration, and the few controls are just a very basic gtk. Still, it’s nice to see concrete progress.
Some very useful extensions are sorely missed, and will very likely never appear in Chrome because they would hurt Google ad and search business
say, where are CustomizeGoogle ? Flashblock ? Adblock Plus ? among many others
So, I gladly stick to my guns (FF of course).
Enjoy
y addons make life and surfing so confortable, so hard to live again without them. I tried chrome and it was fun and new and google is sexy but without adblock, the net looks sooo annoying like 2 years ago, no way i’m doing that to myself.
Yeesh, a browser without ad/content blocking? It’s 2008 guys, not 1998.
A browser without ad blocking from a company whose primary revenue comes from web ads. Inconceivable!
It has been already announced that Chromium will receive an extension API similar to Firefox. Google has released a document stating the project goals and Adblock is specifically mentioned [1].
[1] http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions
It STILL is plagued by the feel of being a throwback to 1997 so far as the UI is concerned, making it the same ‘also ran’ that Safari for windows is.
That it does NOT use the native OS widgets makes it feel out of place, that bookmark handling STILL makes IE4 look robust put’s it completely out of the league of Firefox, much less the feature rich Opera, it doesn’t obey the system metric so it’s useless for ‘large font’ users (problem with webkit AND gecko, they seem to think all computers are 96dpi screens)…
Their ‘most visited’ is still a piss poor version of Opera’s speed dial since they don’t seem to have given the user any control over what’s shown there…
Really wierd is the UI in this release feels sluggish compared to the last one – I try to use the ‘other bookmarks’ dropdown, I can actually see them being drawn – a behavior I’m definately NOT used to seeing on a Q6600 with Ge8800GTS video and 4 gigs of RAM.
I end up with a bunch of “How do you…” questions, and the answer is usually “You don’t”
Color me unimpressed.
Edited 2008-12-12 02:02 UTC
Xorg 7.4 has my resolution at 109 x 112 dpi. Sure I’d love to see 300dpi, at least and 600dpi even more, but then again the Browser isn’t the culprit–it’s the display engines behind them that they leverage aren’t at that level of quality.
I’d love WYSIWYM dpi from screen<->print device.
Resolution Independence is meant to address this with OS X and Linux [as it progresses].
We’ll see.
Honestly Google really messed up by not making a Linux and Mac OS X at the same time. This really shows shows some amateurish actions by Google. If they developed with the idea of cross platform in mind they would probably get a lot better reception.
“Honestly Google really messed up by not making a Linux and Mac OS X at the same time. This really shows shows some amateurish actions by Google. If they developed with the idea of cross platform in mind they would probably get a lot better reception.”
Historically Google develops for Windows first, and then will port to Linux using Wine and such. Is what they did with Google Earth, Picasa, etc. Shouldn’t be a surprise.
Writing cross-platform code is hard. If you have a pretty small team of developers, you make your code work first (and try to avoid obvious x-plat pitfalls) and then think about porting to elsewhere.
The problem is that a browser contains a lot of drawing code, which by its nature is platform-specific. Specially if you’re doing things like hosting multiple processes in a single application Window with correct event routing to all of the UI elements. This part of the product probably needs to be implemented nearly from scratch 3 times (X, Aqua, and User32).
Well they made the same mistake again.
Up front you pick cross platform tools to develop with and go with those. That allows your developers to work on whatever platform they like and helps immensely with catching code & memory errors since different code problems show up on different compilers and OSs.
Going back and refitting causes all kinds of grief and ends up taking more time overall.
I’d much rather see what Google’s idea of a native browser on OS X and Linux is, than yet another cross platform UI that is a lackluster effort on anything but Windows.
Chrome happens to be the only application I really miss from Windows, but it’s not like there wouldn’t be other decent browsers to fill the gap in the meantime.
Me too man, People should first make the application in linux then port into Mac Os X thennnnnn port to that windows stuff OS, the Crappy 1
huh…
First thing I tried with this non-beta was to see if when I close the browser with multiple tabs open, does Chrome now ask if I really want to close all the tabs. It failed to do this in the beta. And it looks like it still fails to do this with this RTM version. This seems to be an obvious thing. Getting something this simple wrong makes me question just how much was actually fixed since the beta.
I get the feeling that I’m going to go through the same usage pattern with this version of Chrome that I went through with the beta. Which is that I love it for a week, using it almost exclusively, then slowly begin using it less and less, and finally not using it at all.
But we’ll see…
I love Chrome. I’ve been using it as my main browser ever since it came out – I want a browser damnit, who needs all the pointless fluff IE, Firefox and Opera offer.
A browser needs to display webpages. Thats’s it.
Yes, but it gotta have NoScript
.
why? the web is too dynamic, so you want to downgrade your experience?
that plugin always confused me. what next, a plugin to disable css?
Nah, on the sites regularly used, scripts are usually fine. They can still be enabled on demand and per site (as opposed to enabling/disabling scripts from the menu for the whole browser).
However, they aren’t always used for enhancing a website. E.g. since browsers started blocking popups, ad developers worked around that using those annoying div-layer ads. Most of these don’t shop up with scripts disabled.
Another example are embedded, automatically loading music players. I listen to my own music already, thank you very much.
As for “NoCSS”, I’d actually like to block background transparency.
On my machine, it makes scrolling choppy at best, and most times it doesn’t really look that good anyway.
Edited 2008-12-16 01:33 UTC
I switched to epiphany on GNOME for the same reasons. Firefox is more like a framework than a web browser. It still has it’s uses for me. It’s the best damn browser for web developing because of extensions like web developer and firebug but when I just want to browse the web I use epiphany.
no…
a browser need to display webpages AND allow you to navigate through them easily. hence the word BROWSER.
which is where things like bookmark management, tab management, “search for” in the context menu, the unsung little plugins like linky and diggler, social bookmarking plugins, stumble-upon bars, mouse gestures and all the “fluff” actually matter. In getting people where they want to go efficiently.
Google’s Chrome site is like a black hole. An infinite loop. There are two “Learn More” links on the main page that lead to… well, information pages. And then on both information pages, there are links titled “Download,” which just leads back to the home page.
I give up. I must’ve found some direct link from another site when I previously downloaded the beta. It is shocking that it’s out of beta already though, being a Google project, and hopefully Mac OS X and Linux support come along well. With Google’s track record though, it’s more likely to be Google-contributed Wine packages. That’s nice in its own way for the improvement of Wine (and Windows compatibility) in general, but a proper port would be awesome.
Chrome seems very promising (especially performance- and stability-wise), and Windows programs under Wine tend to run sluggishly on my system, so it kind of kills the whole point of even running the browser in my case. Not that it runs yet properly in Wine without unofficial hacks in the first place…
Edit: Well, with a Google search I was able to find the following page:
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html
…which is an EULA that you just click “Accept and Install” and it finally gives you the download link. What a nightmare.
Edited 2008-12-12 10:50 UTC
Same “fast because stupid” browser as Safari is.
Nothing special. Less than average.
FF is waaay beyond. “Rendering speed” is not a parameter. I personally absolutely happy how FF renders pages.
It may be fantastic browser(derived from opea+ff+..) But Do you trust google that they aren’t recording your IP, links clicked and many habits?? Google is very big survailance organization which sucks last drop of your internet habits. If they don’t do their revenue model will fail.
Many prople by default use standard chrome interface and are lazy to switch on privacy mode.
I NEVER surf internet while logged in gmail/google account. never use google desktop, never make any google calendar appts, never read any books, reader in google, never put any mobile phone number in google acct, never use google on phone, They ARE evil collecting all data(for improving customer experience???)
Life is better with a tinfoil hat.
Sounds like Firefox with NoScript, CookieSafe/CSLite, and maybe Adblock Plus is just what you need. Or if you’re that damn paranoid… just stay off the Internet.
100 days!? How old is the GMail beta now? Four years according to Wikipedia, and public for nearly two years. It lists the latest release as being over a year old. I didn’t think Google ever dropped the beta tag from their products.
At home I run nothing but Linux and at work, the one place that I actually have Windows running I can’t use it because we use a proxy.
I wonder how long Chrome will be in development for Linux/MacOSX. By the time it is released no one will care. I agree all three platforms should have been released at the same time!. Bad marketing for Google. Maybe Opera will release Opera 10 for Linux and MacOSX first and let Windows users out in the cold for several months.
Maybe someone could let me know, to save me another wasted download: Does it still install its program files into %APPDATA%?
That’s a design decision that’s not gonna fly on Linux.
Edited 2008-12-12 23:42 UTC
Yes, it does and I don’t expect it to change anytime soon/ever. Chrome is a Windows ClickOnce application, and they always install in the user^A's folder.
Thanks for the reference, I’d never heard of ClickOnce before.
Frankly, it sounds like a very misguided idea (but then hey, it’s from MSFT). Two reasons:
1) In a managed multi-user environment, it’ll be incredibly hard work to install this for every user. It’s also more than a little inefficient (some of us do still care about disk usage y’know) to have to have duplicates of the program files for every user.
2) It’s a very poor decision from a security point of view. If the user has binaries sitting in a location that they can write to, what’s to stop malware from corrupting those binaries? There should be *no* executables that are writeable by a luser who’s going to be using the web, because browsers and other web-going apps will *always* have exploits.
The way an updateable application should work is: executables in a non-user-writeable location, e.g. C:\Program Files; Unique user data in %HOME%\Application Data; and a startup task running under the SYSTEM account to check for and apply updates. It’s not hard…!
Chrome is nice. It’s still a toss up for me Firefox or Chrome. The ui of chrome leaves much to be desired but as far as cold start time and page loading it crushes firefox. But after it’s all said and done I still use firefox the most because in my opinion useability comes first and I’m more productive with firefox.
http://dev.chromium.org/
Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all Internet users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.
So i assume one could make changes to the browser.