Does every cloud have a Chrome lining?
I finally downloaded Google’s new browser Chrome. I had intended too the day it was released and procrastinated it for two more days. I downloaded it last night and have been playing with it off and on since then.
What does Chrome mean for web developers? For one thing it means that all development will need to be testing in yet another browser. One of the biggest pains in web development is programming in such a way that sites and page behave consistently across all browsers that support different standards of the same technology [cascading style sheets [CSS] is a good example of this).
On the positive side chrome has some nice built in features like the browser has a nice element inspector built in that seems pretty solid. It behaves almost exactly like the plug-in FireBug for FireFox, which is an invaluable tool for debugging pages and seeing how other implement the presentation of a page. Since Chrome uses a multi-thread approach to the implementation, each tab has its own memory space and process, it has a built in ‘task manager’ feature (just like Windows OS Task Manager) that allow viewing a pages performance in the browser. It will be exciting to see future features designed to make a web developers life easier.
From a user perspective I think the browser is awesome. It is fast, clean, and sleek. I really like the address bar behaving like a command line, a search box, and an intelligent history … clearly a brilliant idea to give it the user more power. You can drag and drop tabs into their own windows, can recover accidently closed tabs, and much more. I personally look forward to seeing the impact this beta browser will have on the browser market all together. They are certainly pushing the envelope.
