Update: Google's Chrome: More Than A Browser?

The question: Are the current browsers good enough to keep up with the user’s online needs? Apparently, Google thinks that the answer is no. Unlike ten years ago, the time spent online by each and every one of us has increased and nowadays we use the Internet for various activities, from playing games to order our food.

And Google believes that while the Web evolved, our tools to search, discover and display information, the browsers, haven’t evolved that much.

"For how much the Web has evolved, browsers haven't evolved that much," says Sundar Pichai, Google's vice-president of product management. "What we're trying to do with Chrome is make sure the browsers are really evolving with the Web," he adds.

Indeed, Google might have a point. For the past years, Internet Explorer has remained the major browser of choice and its competitors, like Firefox, Safari or Opera are still lagging behind in terms of market share.

Therefore, what we need now is not only a new contender in the browser war, but a whole new approach. Systematically, with Google Mail, Google Docs and other various services, Google is building a new online ecosystem, in which Google Chrome fits perfectly. And more important, Google applications are OS agnostic. All you need to use them is...a browser.

Google, no doubt, wants greater control over the browser platform, since the Web browser today is quickly becoming the operating system of tomorrow. The company that controls it will have the same kind of inside edge on application development and standards that Microsoft has had with its ubiquitous Windows platform.

Nevertheless, Google Chrome is still in its infancy stage, but it bears the things to come. Its elegant, minimalistic interface is designed to give as much space as possible to the webpage itself, with many elements such as the status bar and bookmark toolbar, which are present in IE and Firefox being reduced to temporary pop-ups of sorts, and others removed altogether, such as the menu bar.

Searching itself is accomplished in what in most browsers is the Address bar, toward the very top of the browser window. Open the browser, and your cursor is within the Search field by default. As you surf the Internet, the browser "learns" which Web sites you frequent the most. On subsequent openings of the browser, or when you return to the browser's main screen (Alt-Home on the keyboard), you'll see thumbnails of your most frequently visited sites. Web sites themselves thus become the equivalent of desktop icons in Microsoft Windows.

Another noteworthy technical aspect is that each tab launches its own process, in order to prevent the whole app crashing in case of a malfunctioning website, in theory at least.

The settings, available through a button to the right of the address box, are pretty bare-bones as of now, but do include everything that is expected of a next-generation browser: a password manager, tab settings, popup blocker, network settings etc.

After 10 days of using Google Chrome, I might conclude that Chrome loads faster than any browser on the market and fast load times have clearly always been important to Google, and probably this thing won’t change with the future releases.

Page scrolling is choppier than it is with the "smooth scrolling" technologies implemented in Internet Explorer and Firefox. This, too, may improve with future releases, but currently there's no smooth scrolling option in the Options panel of Chrome.

One more interesting feature is the incognito window, which when activated saves no browsing history, no passwords, and cache and cookies are immediately cleared upon closing. Google however are kind enough to inform you that it offers no protection against tracking websites, ISP logging, keyloggers, secret agents and people standing right behind you...

Of course, Google Chrome still has a long road ahead until becoming a full grown, mature product, but so far it seems like Google has a winner in its hand.

It will be interesting to see the next version of Google Chrome because, besides fixing the current bugs, a future release will probably bring a better integration with the various version and also some desired features such as a better management system for the bookmarks and an integrated RSS reader. Imagine a browser, which fits perfectly with services like Google Docs, Picasa or YouTube.

But right now, Google Chrome seems the first browser that aims to be perfect for the future online world.