Thoughts on Chrome
You’ve probably heard the buzz — Google is releasing it’s own web browser. It’s called Chrome, and if you haven’t seen it already, you can read their introduction comic here. It’s definitely worth a read as it illustrates beautifully the different problems Google identified in today’s web browsers, and what their proposed solutions are.
Here are my first impressions and thoughts on the several key usability and user experience features they’ve outlined.
Tabs on the outside
Google moves the website tabs up above the address bar. At first I thought they looked a bit out of place there — the tabs we’re all used to in Firefox, Safari and IE are tucked nicely inside the app window, and seem to “fit” there. However, on second glance the tabs above the bar make a lot of sense. They actually support the real life tab metaphor because that’s where they are meant to be — above all the content. It’s also interesting to note that Opera has already adapted this idea, although it still has the toolbar above the tabs.
This also gives greater importance to each tab (and they should since we’re not only browsing simple web pages now, but whole applications hosted on the web — each tab holds its own bit of software). They also look easier to “pull” out — something you can do in Safari and Firefox, but doesn’t feel right since the tabs are sitting right inside the window, not at the top.
Inline auto-completion
One feature that I love on Safari that doesn’t work the same on Firefox is auto-completion in the address bar. In Safari, auto-completion happens inline, meaning once I start typing, I can hit Enter once it recognizes where I want to go. In Firefox I need to hit the down arrow to select the first result and then hit Enter. I’m pleased to see Google adapting inline auto-completion.
Search sites using the “omni bar”
This is a big one. The address bar, which Google calls the “omni bar” (an answer to the Firefox awesome bar?) can also act as a search bar for other websites.
For example, start typing “amazon”, wait for it to find the Amazon website, and then hit the Tab key. You can now type a search string into the bar to search Amazon. Brilliant.
Goodbye blank homepage
A lot of people, including me, tend to use a blank homepage on their browser. The reason is simple — it loads blazingly fast. Google thinks they can make a better solution by putting all my most popular sites on the home page, including some search queries and recent favorites. I like this thinking. I tend to visit a few websites most of the time, so this should speed up this access. Also, because the browser won’t actually be loading another website, this page should load just as quickly as a blank page.
Pop-ups confined to their tab
Another nice little UI feature in Chrome is the way it’s going to manage pop-up windows. To stop the pop-up spam of the early web, browsers introduced pop-up blockers. However, not all pop-ups are bad, but the browser can’t tell the difference — and so babies end up being thrown out with the bath-water. Google solves this problem by adding little pop-up boxes at the bottom of the window — you can drag the box out to show the pop-up. That’s great.
Simpler UI for web apps
This is another interesting and much needed feature. When using web applications you’re not browsing websites. Standard browser controls aren’t needed — you just need the browser as a window to the app. On the OS X Firefox you can actually collapse the UI area to view just the page with the menu hide button — but it would be great to have the browser automatically do it.
This idea has also been implemented in various forms. Two notable apps are Fluid and Mozilla’s Prism. The web is becoming just more than just information — it’s becoming our access to applications — so it makes absolute sense to minimize the UI in those cases to support that usage context.
Overall, I’m very impressed with what Google have outlined so far. If they can deliver these promises then I think we’re in for something special — it looks like it’s going to be a fast, stable and very user-friendly browser.
2 Sep, 2008
Re Tabs on the outside, from the concept screenshots it looks like the applications title bar still sits above the tabs which somewhat ruins the end-effect. Also looked like the title wasn’t tracking the opened tabs.
Also think I’ll miss my custom start page, the other issues with quickdial is your history becomes way more public. I suppose this may be one of the reasons for the privacy
porn’surprise present’ mode - but it’d still be very easy to accidentally show the boss I’ve been surfing the family of ‘bigjubblies.xxx’ sites all day (I havn’t boss). Let alone any network round trips to grab the screenshots.I’ve already got an ‘amazon’ quicklink in my firefox that’ll search amazon.co.uk for anything I type amazon[space]title[enter].. aside from the supposed auto-discovery of ‘keywords’ one things missing is if I just type amazon[enter] I get amazon with empty or random set of results (?q=). Nothing an addon couldn’t fix.
Which is why I’d expect Chrome to become a breeding ground for fresh interaction concepts, the best of which finding themselves in the next version of the dominant browsers.
Still sounds very worthwhile though.
2 Sep, 2008
I’m more interested in how well it will comply with css3. As of now, most browsers are rather disappointing. I’m also curious if Google will implement any proprietary features for Chrome. (e.g. IE’s filter, expressions)
2 Sep, 2008
@Jin - its based on webkit, so it’ll handle css3 the same way safari does.
2 Sep, 2008
Tab inside vs outside… while the outside tab may be the more accurate display metaphor… I’d have to absolutely balk at that if you regularly run tool bars (ex: Webdeveloper / netcraft) in firefox.
If the tabs are outside… that gives me (hold on) actually 5 rows to look up and above the content I’m trying to focus on!!!
1 - regular firefox menus (File, Edit, etc.)
2 - browser url line
3 - personal toolbar
4 - web developer toolbar
5 - netcraft toolbar
Of course, I could cut those off but that somewhat defeats the purpose. Inside is still a way better deal for me.
Yep, just for R&D I’m off to research toggling firefox toolbars off and on.
2 Sep, 2008
Just download the chrome and a nice feature that i like is the “incognito tab” or the “porn tab’ as they called it.
2 Sep, 2008
I have implemented the feature of “visiting most visited websites fast” on my personal project http://www.fav20.com
That new tab on chrome is not that customizable for now, but overall, chrome is a good(very fast) browser. I will use it but still save my homepage fav20.
2 Sep, 2008
Just tried the real deal and the titles do follow the tab. Only the title isn’t shown in the main window only on the taskbar (misinterpreted the google branding on the screenshots).
Interface-wise I found myself missing a home button. The only way to get ‘home’ seemed to be opening a new tab or window. Jarringly closing the last tab closes the browser - rather than hiding the tabs before it’s too late as firefox might. Once closed the tabs don’t restore. Guess they might expect your tabs to be presented next time in the speed dial, but if you keep three open then do a long session opening & closing lots tabs 4,5 & 6 you’d quickly lose them in the mix.
Noted an inability? to delete a quickdial entry once it’s on you homepage - which could indeed become embarrassing.. incognito is all well & good if you remember to use it, but how many times have you clicked on something you shouldn’t or accidentally overwritten a tab you didn’t mean to?
Found the omni search fiddly to use. With chrome I needed to visit amazon before the tab->search context worked. Just typing amazon searched google, but after visiting the site the behaviour changes which could be confusing. Not least because it appears to expresses a preference for registering the keyword with .com not my regional .co.uk. So my amazon keyword is actually amazon.co.uk[tab]title. Tried imdb and it wouldn’t work at all. Ironically typing google[tab] also failed - always searches google rather than change to [Search Google] context. May be because it imported my ie bookmarks and at least two google bookmarks in the process? looks like you can customize them manually (looks identical to firefox keywords).
At least with firefox I’ve created all my keywords manually so I know what keywords are active and anything else I type in the url bar (or search box) searches google.
Was nice & fast though, reports of it being a 400k download are misleading that’s only the downloader. It’s 46mb on my XP box - the install location was weird too, down in my profile local settings? so every user on the same machine has to download their own copy? program files and cache sit side-by-side?
Gears freaked me out. Already using gears in firefox and when I clicked the icon in chrome it looked like it was going to reinstall rather than reuse my existing gears. Or at least I panicked it was going to overwrite my existing gears db and tried to back out ~ which messed up the browser tab.
Looks-wise it’s minimal, didn’t use my XP theme (its not lunar blue). Not convinced shipping dev tools in every copy is the right thing to do. Saw the same thing lauded with the ie8 beta - it’s not a good thing to over complicate the browser for the small percentage of developers who’d have the least problems installing additional plugins.
3 Sep, 2008
@Richard:
The home button is enabled by going to ‘options’ and under the ‘home page’ section, click ’show home button on the toolbar’. You can also set your custom home page there.
3 Sep, 2008
One thing I see very nice also is the task manager for the tabs, so you can know which website is taking more memory and close it if necessary.
3 Sep, 2008
> Search sites using the “omni bar”
Opera also have this feature. You just type a letter of you favorite search engine in the adress bar and then type the query and press [enter] key. ie:
g search phrase // google
y search phrase // yahoo
a search phrase // amazon
3 Sep, 2008
Jin: That’s definitely a concern of mine too, but as Dan has pointed out it is based on Webkit so it should be very standards compliant and forgiving at the same time. I’ve just given it a spin, and so far all the sites look fine to me, so I don’t think it will be a problem for developers to work with :)
Richard — very good points. I was trying to do the Amazon search with Tab but it didn’t work — until I realised I had to perform at least one search on their site before it recognized it.. silly me.
I definitely agree about how closing the tab shouldn’t close the window. I think it should just go to the home screen once you close all the tabs (well, you won’t technically ‘close’ the last tab, you’ll just reset it to home).
I think taking stuff away from the home page is probably harder to implement than just adding a button. Once you’ve taken something off and you want to put it back on (e.g. accidentally) how would you do it? Keep a record of “off” sites? That may not be ideal too.
Overall — I really like it. My browser of choice is Safari on OS X, and I find Chrome looks and behaves very similar to how I use the browser. I also love the search suggestions it puts in the omni bar — their accuracy is great, while keeping the suggestions list to a minimum. Had the browser crash once after working with Google Docs and had one of the tabs “dissapear” when I was dragging them around, so obviously some stuff to work on, but otherwise it’s actually really fast and delivers what it promised.
If I used Windows as my main OS, I’d probably switch to it.