It’s been about a year since I last wrote about Google Chrome — the new browser from Google — so I thought I’d take a look back and see what’s changed.
Where We’re At
The browser has matured considerably since its first incarnation, to the point that it’s now stable enough for production use.
Climbing steadily in usage since it was released, it’s now reached up to 7% of the market share in technical circles. This is more than both Opera and Apple Safari combined, which is quite astounding. It’s reached incredible inroads in such a short time, and there’s no denying it’s now a big player in the market.
It’s difficult to tell where these users have come from, but with Internet Explorer 7 and six both haemorrhaging users, it’s a pretty fair bet a lot of these people are skipping the upgrade to IE8. Aggressive marketing also plays a part in this gain, with viral videos achieving success overseas and the Google homepage offering Chrome as an upgrade path to IE6 visitors.
What to Expect
Introducing friends and family members to the new browser has had mixed results. It still has quirks I haven’t worked out.
One such issue is the proprietary interface not matching the OS. On the ageing Windows XP, the iconic blue Chrome interface is a breath of fresh air even if it is unusual. On Vista it’s purportedly quite nice with Aero enabled. Conversely on Windows seven it’s terribly out of place.
- The official Linux build of Chrome 3 suffers the unfortunate interface unkindly. The default colour is a stark contrast to any native Ubuntu application, and the native compatibility mode is a cheap mimic of the native GTK (GTK is the native UI toolkit.) The only consolation is an option to use the native title bar, which is a band-aid solution as the widgets are still unusual.
- Chrome on Windows 7 looks terrible. I couldn’t get it to use the Aero effects, rather it stayed repugnantly blue and insolent. The Chrome icon also seems stuck in the Windows XP era, and won’t scale bigger than 48*48. This means it shows up on the desktop as a smaller icon bounded by a box.
While these problems may be overcome in the future, it’s a keen demonstration as to why effort should have gone into an intelligent cross-platform interface instead of hooking directly into the Windows-only “WPF.”
Multi-user Quirks
While Chrome is a great power-user browser, it’s still not suited to multi-user Windows environments.
I’ll freely admit it’s been a few months since I last tried this, but installing Chrome on a shared system for multiple users simply doesn’t work. You can set it as the default browser, but none of the shortcuts show up for anyone else other than the account you installed it with.
This is obviously a barrier that’s going to need sorting out.
Chrome in the Enterprise
There’s also been mixed reviews on Chrome in the enterprise.
As Internet Explorer becomes gratuitously more bloated and difficult to use, Google’s in an ideal position to push Chrome for enterprise use. Enterprise Chrome doesn’t seem to be gaining much ground, mostly because it’s still not easy enough to support.
The sticking factor is the large enterprises using ActiveX and primarily Microsoft technology. Chrome offers few to no incentives for this kind of large-scale corporate environment, because it’s tied to Google services, not configurable through group policy and otherwise offers no tools for mass-rollouts.
The redeeming factor is the “Google Apps Desktop Features” which will integrate Gmail, Calendar, Docs and other hosted offerings with Windows. This is an interesting move to make Google’s hosted offerings as integrated as standard desktop applications, but it’s still a manual install, which makes unattended roll-outs difficult or impossible.
At this point Chrome looks to be a boon to small businesses relying on the Google platform, but it doesn’t offer anything compelling for larger businesses running on Microsoft platforms.
What’s next?
It’s entirely to be expected that Chrome will mature further, and judging by the innovation and intelligence that’s been focused on it already, it’s bound to solve a lot of these problems I’ve presented here.
It’s already a strong competitor on the desktop, and the closest competition seems slow and bloated by comparison. It looks like Firefox — the old favourite “faster browser” — has been well and truly de-throned in the speed department, and Chrome holds the new title for overall user experience even if it still has some market share left to pick up.