Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Playing with Google Chrome

I get pretty excited everytime I hear something new on the web browser realm. As we all know a new browser named Chrome from Google has been announce and everybody wants to take a look at it, as I did right away.

What interests me the most is to see how fast this new V8 Javascript engine is(I am not javascript expert). As I believe the performance of the javscript is very important for the future web application.

I try some sites and notice that Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Docs performs faster. I don't have any benchmark but you could really able to feel the performance gain with Chrome. Then I try it with VersionOne(a project planning and management tool) which I had some performance problem due to it's heavy javascript usage, but the result is VersionOne doensn't function well.

While playing with it, I like the tabs on Chrome it's the best I've ever seen it has the most complete features. The minimalist UI of Chrome is very nice and the way they implement the status bar is very unique and fell for it. Over all the Chrome is really speedy, but it uses a lot of memory, really a lot!

Though Google admits that they're not creating Chrome to conquer the browser market but to set a new trend in making a browser that's really meant for Web 2.0, I believe we'll be seeing more good things on the future browser. The seperate process for each tab and improve javascript performance is the key and Chrome will succeed on this one and eventually browsers base on Chrome will come out. Firefox 3.1 is just around the corner, we'll see also how much improvement it does in javascript performance.

Are we going to have a Browser2.0?