Chrome continued

I finally managed to try out Google Chrome. It was not a good experience. First of all, let me clarify that I know it is a Beta release and is probably not a reflection on how the product will turn out to be in later versions. However, being a software engineer myself I am aware of the standards a Beta release from any decent self-respecting company should meet. This release does not meet those standards. My take is that Google never meant to release Chrome for at least the next couple of months. They were forced to do so because information about it leaked out. Given a choice they would have resolved some of the major problems, stabilized the product and then announced it to the world. This is borne out by the nature of problems plaguing this release. The problems are mostly related to memory consumption, stability, compatibility, etc. These are short-term problems which are typically taken care of during intensive testing cycles which this release missed. On the other hand, the design decisions that went into Chrome are fundamentally sound and should pay rich dividends later in the product life cycle.
I did not sit and go through every feature of Chrome. Nor did I consciously compare it with other browsers in the market. Here are my impressions of the basic product in isolation:

User-Interface - Chrome continues the Google tradition of minimalist product interfaces. Google has maintained this tradition in all of its products till date and has been the gainer for it. The Chrome UI is very elegant and it does not miss out on any major functionality. Combining the address bar and the search bar is a very cool idea. Of course, once Google unveils the API kit to develop add-on plugins for Chrome, everyone will be free to add his/her own bit to the UI and mess it up. But then it won't be Google's fault.

Separate process for each tab - This is one of the design decisions that will have long term gains. Having separate process for each tab will insulate them from one another minimizing browser crashes. It will of course add a lot of overhead in terms of resource utilization. So if you have a not-too-high-end machine forget about Chrome. Also, as of now the product is too unstable to show any benefits of this design. Browser crashes are pretty frequent.

Grouping tabs into new windows - Another great idea. Often when I use a browser for a long time I end up creating a lot of tabs which I subsequently want to move to a new window. This feature will let me do that.

Incognito - A special window whose activity cannot be tracked? Great for watching porn. But enterprises will probably want to be able to disable this feature on corporate networks.

Buggy product - Some problems that I faced:

1. I had opened five tabs and was browsing through the Times Of India website watching news clips and reading articles. After one hour of browsing the memory consumption reached almost 300 MB and the machine became very slow.
2. I closed the browser but one instance of the process continued to show up in Task Manager. I had to kill the process manually.
3. On Vista, if a browser instance is running, the machine hangs when trying to hibernate.

All in all, Chrome has the potential to become a great browser in the future but I am not going to use it till it becomes more reliable.

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Chrome woes

Google launched their new web browser yesterday. They call it Chrome. I am dying to install and try it out but for some reason it is just not starting up. Every time I try to start it, it gives an application error and shows an irritating smiley. The error log says that some essential files have not been installed. Downloading again and reinstalling does not help. Granted this is a Beta or trial version but I still expect some reliability from a software I install on my machine. And surely I should be able to expect better quality from Google. What makes it more frustrating is that hundreds of other people have already been able to try it out successfully. The web is full of reviews and screen shots. Meanwhile, I can only sit and sulk.



The offending screen.

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You have been erased!!!

Disaster struck in office on Monday. My computer refused to boot. I have three machines in my cube. I use two of them for (secret...wink, wink) developmental activities. The third is for communicating with the outside world. It is my email machine, the machine I use for browsing the net and, since the last few months, also the machine I use for blogging. In short, it is my lifeline. So of course, it had to be the machine to conk out. I had to spend a three days out of touch with the world. Not that it bothers me the least, I am only too happy to be left alone. But work suffered. I have got a new hard disk now and am back online. However, I have lost all personal data that was on the old disk. This includes online passwords, bank and credit card passwords and statements, pictures and everything else I had accumulated in the last three years that I have been using this machine. Its like the soft copy of the last three years of my life has been erased. Feels funny. Strangely enough, what I am most bothered about is the loss of a Eva Mendes wall paper that I had set as desktop background. It was a beautiful black and white portrait of the lady. I spent last evening looking for that wall paper all over the net but did not find it. Passwords and statements I can find again, but beauty lost once is lost for ever. I think I will now switch of the computer and spend some time mourning my loss. In case you haven't guessed already, I love Eva Mendes...

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