1. Easy installation
2. Sleek top menu bars give more real estate to the web pages
3. Shows thumbnails of most visited pages as the default page
4. Less configuration options
5. Robust Incognito window (porn mode)

Cons (so far)

1. Not available for Linux
2. No built-in RSS reader
3. Limited configuration options
4. MS Silverlight based applications do not work
5. Cannot leverage the plethora of Firefox plugins

After lots of news and attention since yesterday, Google’s very own web browser called Chrome is finally available for download now, but only for Windows.

To start with, since I’m on Linux (Fedora 9), the download page http://www.google.com/chrome, did not show me a download link but instead prompted me to subscribe (with my E-mail) to get alerted when Chrome is available for Linux.

I subscribed to the alert and then quickly launched Win XP SP2 in VirtualBox (a VMWare or Virtual PC like virtual machine) from my Fedora 9 laptop. Went to the download page and, this time, was greeted by a download link for WinXP/Vista. Downloaded the installer (about 400KB in size). The installer when run, in turn, downloaded the browser (took about 3-4 minutes on a 2Mbps link). Following is the first look of Chrome when it got launched (automatically) after the installation:

The first launch

I should have been in the first or in one the first batches of people to download (started downloading @ 00:55 hrs IST) and run Chrome. I was regularly hitting the site when suddenly the Chrome’s page (earlier was a 404 message page) showed up Writing this line from within Chrome . Will explore and write more about this new kid in town. So do visit back! Okay, Im continuing to write about it now:

Quick Notes

• Installation, no questions asked: During Chrome’s installation, no questions were asked on where to install, what to install, what to import and what not to. The only prompt I got was when Chrome could not import Firefox’s bookmarks because Firefox was open. It imported Internet Explorer 6′s and Firefox 3′s bookmarks.
• No “default browser” nagging: Thankfully (very thankfully indeed) Chrome does not nag to make it a default browser, not even once. If you indeed want to make it the default, you can click on the “Customize and control Google Chrome” icon on the top right and then click on Options. There you will find a button to make it the default.
• Tabs are Windows:Chrome, as a norm these days, has tabbed browsing. But what is interesting is the location bar, back, forward buttons, bookmarks, tools/options menu and everything else is below (or inside the tab), as oppose to being above or outside the tab. The latter is what we see in IE and Firefox. This gave the impression that the tabs are like independent but “placed together” windows. It is a kinda  MDI (Multiple Document Interface  application.
• Non intrusive “remember password” prompt: To continue writing this post from Chrome, I logged into my Blog and Chrome displayed the remember password prompt on the top without stopping the loading of the blog admin page (the page after login). That is, it did not pop-up a box saying “do you want to remember the password or not” and did not wait for me to say yes or no to continue loading the admin page. This feature is already showcased by and present in Firefox 3.
• A Beta with an uninstaller: It was glad to see the beta with an uninstaller. Sometimes beta applications do not ship with an uninstaller but Chrome does. Though I’m in no mood to execute the uninstaller
• Installation Location and size: No, Chrome does not install in Program Files. It installs in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome, where <user> is the Windows login name of the user who is installing the application. This means that Chrome installed by one user will not be available to any other user of that system. I think this is rather a thought of location for a beta application. Perhaps the final version will install in Program FIles(by Administrator) and be available to all users. The installation size (basically the size of the folder) was about 46MB! I’m assuming that it did not install files elsewhere.
• Placement in quick launch menu: This is an interesting one. Chrome’s shortcut was placed on the quick launch bar – the first icon from the Start Menu. As far as I remember new shortcuts are placed towards the end of the quick launch menu (unless you move it) . Hmm has Google done some trick here ? As said above, I installed Chrome on WinXP SP2
• Built-in Spell Check: Chrome has built-in spell checker, just like Firefox. The spell checker underlines (in red) any misspellings in the typed in text in textareas (rectangular text boxes) on any webpage.
• NO RSS ???: Chrome could not detect RSS feeds in websites. Forget that, it could not even display RSS feeds in a formatted way like IE 7 or Firefox 3. It just throws the entire, unformatted text between the RSS tags. There should be a good enough reason for this. I can only think of its beta status.

So after writing this much (as above) I went to sleep (@ 05:00 hrs IST) so that I can browse with Chrome on a fresh new day.

Started my day at around 11:00 IST and started browsing through Chrome while in bed. Now sitting at my office and what I saw and seeing, is what I’m writing:

Chrome’s default page

The default page, when Chome is launched or a new tab/window is opened, is now changed to look as follows:

Default page after some browsing

That is, the default page changed to show me the most visited sites using Chrome. Visiting my favouite website is just one click away! Makes all the sense. One may tend to visit his favourite/most visted site when he launches the browser.

But the issue is, if I want to avoid one or more of my “most visited” site from showing up, I can’t. The only option is to delete the entire browsing history. Take this scenario as an example. I’m amy be giving a presentation, I launch Chrome and everyone sees a porn site as one of my most visited sites on the projector’s screen . I would like to delete just the porn site from the most visited list. While there is a way to avoid the recording of  browsing history (which I will write about a little later), but on a day to day basis one may forget to use it.

Coming back, so the default page is the recently visited sites. But there is an option in the “Customize and control Google Chrome” menu (lets call it the Tools menu hereafter), to enter the URL and make a webpage as default. You can find this at Tools>Options>Basics (tab)>Home Page>Open this page. This webpage then shows up when you launch or re-launch Chrome. But when you open a new tab or window, Chrome still shows the most visited sites. But if you check the checkbox which says “Show home button on the toolbar”. This shows a Home button (like in Firefox). Clicking on this button will open the default page that you have set.

Next as a developer, I thought occured to me. What about all those links on websites which say “make this site your default page”. Will they work ? Went to in.yahoo.com which has the link (on top left) to “Make Yahoo! India your homepage”. Clicking on this link showed!:

When I clicked to make Yahoo my home page

Instructions for Firefox!. It asked me to drag the link to the home button – but the Chrome’s Home button did not accept a drop of a link. This brings us to two questions:

1. Is a JavaScript function or some other method required for Chrome to make a website the default page ?
2. Why is Yahoo detecting Chrome as Firefox ?

Answering the first question, I feel it is not required. It makes sense that your most visited pages compose your default page.This means the websites should detect out Chrome and hide such links to set the default page.

And Yahoo is detecting Chrome as Firefox because Chrome identifies itself (via the useragent string) as a Mozilla browser. Following is the useragent string for Chrome:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Plugins

Installation of Flash plugin is easy and does not require a manual downloading. Once installed, for the first time, the page which demanded Flash plugin automatically refreshes to show the Flash objects or movies

Trying to browse some Silverlight apps at www.silverlight.net prompted to download and install the SilverLight plugin. The plugin installation refused to install at the first go saying that the browser or the operating system (Win XP in my case) may be incompatible. Manually clicking on, to download the Windows version, installed SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2. Henceforth, upon trying to browse SilverLight applications, showed some glimpse of the SilverLight 1.0 and 2.0 applications which were very slow and unresponsive. To summarize MS SilverLight does not seem to work with Chrome. But there should have been a clear alert by Chrome stating the same, rather than users expecting for something to happen, after seeing a glimpse of something happening and waiting for it to happen (forever).

Also just, indeed just, tried my luck by trying to install a Firefox addon (namely Sage-Too) but didn’t work. No complains though, after all Chrome is not based on the Gecko engine (which Firefox uses). Chrome uses WebKit

For Java applets, if you have installed Java Runtime Environment on Windows, Chrome shows the applets.

Porn mode a.k.a. Incognito

Like IE 8′s (Internet Explorer 8)  in-private browsing (also popular as Porn mode), Chrome features Incognito window. It can be launched from the “Control the current page”>New incognito window menu (the icon before the Tools icon).

The Incognito WIndow

It launches a distinct window with an detective wearing goggles icon on the top right – giving you a go ahead to do something goofy. As you can read in the Incognito window, this window will delete any cookies or browsing history. It still stores cookies while you are browsing. So this means it will not hamper a continuous browsing session if Cookies play a role (if any) in it. That is: your browsing experience will be as usual as before. But features like “remember me” against login boxes on websites will be useless because ‘remember me” typically remembers your login and password via Cookies. But these Cookies are destroyed when you close the Incognito window.

Since Chrome claimed that the Cookies etc. gets destroyed when the Incognito window is closed, I tried to trick it as follows. I launched the Incognito window and browsed to a site with login and remember me. Checked “remember me” and then logged in. So at this point, the Cookie would have got stored on the hard disk. Next instead of closing the Incognito window, I just closed my virtual machine, simulating an abnormal shutdown. When I booted in back, and went to the login site in the Incognito window, it did not fill up the username and password. So i could not trick the Incognito window . Chrome must be performaing a clean up on start up too.

The interesting bit is, in the Incognito window, the URLs get auto completed with the URLs you have typed in the non-Incognito window. But if you have used, for example, the remember me on a Website, the password is still not remembered in the Incognito window. So it is kinda, while the Incognito window can pick up the browsing history from the normal window, it does not pick up the Cookies. Is this an unconscious miss out or a deliberate distinction ?

–Will continue to write more, watch out!—-