Review from arstechnica vol.1

Google launched its first foray into the browser wars today with the official release of Chrome, a new open source web browser that aims to push forward Internet innovation and elevate user expectations. Although Chrome is still a bit light on features, it is surprisingly polished and has an assortment of highly promising capabilities that could influence the future of browser design.

User interface

The Chrome user interface is extremely minimalistic. The Chrome tab bar, which is mounted along the top of the window, seamlessly converges with the application titlebar. The toolbar and URL textbox are displayed below the tabs in a layout that is reminiscent of Opera.

Users can drag the tabs to reorder them or drag them between individual windows. There are some nice visual flourishes that accompany various tab management tasks. Tab reordering shows a smooth sliding animation, for instance, and a translucent thumbnail overlay appears when the user snaps a tab out of the browser. The visual feedback provided by these subtle cues improves usability without disrupting the flow of user interaction.

Although Google obviously invested a lot of effort into fine-tuning the usability of the tab implementation, I identified a handful of weaknesses. The biggest is the lack of support for tab overflow handling. Unlike most browsers, which generally display a menu of some kind with a list of tabs that do not fit into the tab bar, Chrome just keeps making the tabs smaller so that more will fit. With a sufficiently large number of tabs, the labels become completely obscured.

Another frustration is that double-clicking the combined tab/title bar causes the window to maximize instead of creating a new tab. This is the most visible case where Chrome's tendency to mix user interface paradigms creates a clear conflict in expected behavior.

There are a few key features that seem to have been left out, including the complete absence of support for RSS. Most modern browsers have RSS readers integrated directly into the user interface. Chrome doesn't even provide any kind of visual notification when the user browses a page that has a feed. I expected Chrome to have some kind of RSS component that integrates with Google Reader, but no such luck.

One aspect of the Chrome user interface that particularly impressed me is the autocompletion mechanism in the URL textbox, which Google refers to as the Omnibar. This feature is evidently inspired by the Firefox 3 AwesomeBar, but it embellishes on the concept and adds some really nice additional features. In addition to providing completion suggestions based on the user's history and bookmarks, it will also provide domain recommendations and allow users to perform searches.

The domain recommendations seem to be powered by something like Google Suggest. When you start typing in a domain name, the system will offer completions based on the most popular sites that start with the same letters. For instance, when you type "c" it will offer cnn.com even if the user has not previously visited that site.

The default Chrome home page displays thumbnails of the user's most frequently visited sites. This feature looks a lot like Opera's Speed Dial. It also displays the bookmark toolbar, a sidebar with recent bookmarks, and a history search. It brings together a bunch of useful functionality and it loads pretty close to instantly, so it's a nice step up from about:blank.