I thought I would be a Firefox user till I died, but holy crap Chrome is fast! I can launch Firefox, go make a sandwich, launch Chrome and be browsing before Firefox loads. This is particularly nice on our crappy Windows machines at work. JavaScript is noticeably faster. Chrome seems more stable and doesn’t do that occasional temporary freeze thing on slow computers. As much. Well, at least the whole thing doesn’t freeze, just the one tab that is having trouble.
Extensions
The Dev and Beta version of Chrome work with extensions (like LastPass, worlds greatest password manager). The dev version has been very stable for me:
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel
Developer Tools! Eeeee!
The thing that sealed the deal is the built-in developer tools. Seems they’ve shipped Chrome with a built-in Firebug-like JavaScript debugger and inspector (press ctrl-shift-j). Its not installed automatically on Linux machines, so apt-get it:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser-inspector
I haven’t used it enough to form an opinion yet, but it looks great. I’m going to finish out the current site I’m developing with Firefox and Firebug, but I’ve got another one in the pipe that is going to be all Chrome.
Fantastic UI
Best user interface of any browser I’ve used.
The teeny tiny branding means I get at least a quarter inch of screen real estate that would normally be full of dialog. Page loading info is shown in a tiny pop-up at the bottom, so I get more space there too. Its overlaid on top of the horizontal scroll bar, taking up no room at all. The combo address/search bar means the horizontal space is more usable too. I can usually see the whole url even when I’m using Chrome in a small window.
I love love love the tabs at the very top. It reinforces the idea that each tab is its own process doing its own thing (dialogs like preferences are also displayed in a tab, just like web pages). Tabs are arguably the most important feature of the browser dialog, they tell you where you are, and I definitely click on them more than anything else. Making them a big target right at the top where they are the most obvious thing in the whole interface is genius.
Way to go Google! Can’t wait for Chrome OS!
Update, 2/25/2010
Well, I tried. Turns out that the Chrome developer tools has some usability issues that make it very hard to use effectively. The number one problem is that the font is too small. I get a headache just glancing at it. I’m also annoyed by the checkboxes that pop up when you mouse over a css property. I’m sure that one sounded really great on paper, but in practice its horrible. The major thing it lacks is the “Larger Command Line” option that Firebug has, which allows you to put multi-line indented code in the console and run it. It’s really nice and I use it all the time.
I still really like Chrome and I use it more and more (even though it doesn’t work with Netflix) for my non-development browsing pleasure. Its still a young project and I’m hopeful that Google will improve the developer tools soon.