Review from arstechnica vol.2

The Chrome bookmark user interface looks pretty similar to the one in Firefox 3. Users bookmark a page by clicking a star icon that appears on the left-hand side of the URL textbox. This displays a popup in which the user can specify a title and select the location where the bookmark will be stored. Unlike Firefox, the system doesn't support tagging.

Bookmarks are not displayed in the user interface by default except on the start page, but users can optionally enable a bookmarks bar that clings to the bottom of the main toolbar. Bookmark support is still very limited in Chrome and it lacks a full bookmark management interface.

Incognito mode

Another nice feature that Google has touted is the Incognito mode, which disables history tracking. This is similar to Safari's Private Browsing mode and it's becoming a standard feature in many browsers. Rather than being able to toggle Incognito mode across the entire program, users can open special windows that are set in Incognito mode. To indicate that Incognito mode is enabled, the window panes are rendered in dark grey instead of blue and have an icon of a cloaked man.

In light of what most users will do with the Incognito mode, I think that a Ceiling Cat icon would be far more appropriate:

Internals

The heart of Chrome is the WebKit engine, a lightweight HTML renderer that was developed by Apple with parts of the KDE project's open source KHTML component. WebKit offers a nice balance of performance, standards compliance, and reliability that make it a good choice for browsers. WebKit has also proven to be very portable, scalable, and conducive to embedding.

In addition to serving as the renderer in Apple's Safari browser on both desktop and mobile devices, WebKit has also been adopted for use in numerous other contexts, including the Adobe AIR runtime, Trolltech's Qt toolkit, Nokia's S60 web browser, and Google's Android web browser. It's therefpre unsurprising that Google decided to use WebKit for Chrome.

Chrome provides outstanding performance comparable to other browsers. Load time is extremely fast and the user interface is snappy. Chrome starts up and shuts down quickly and I encountered little lag.

Although Chrome is built on top of WebKit, the Chrome developers decided to eschew SquirrelFish, Apple's new high-performance JavaScript runtime implementation. Instead, Chrome uses V8, a unique virtual machine that was developed by a team of specialists in Denmark. V8 was designed from the ground up to provide good performance for large-scale web applications that make extensive use of JavaScript. It has a built-in JIT compiler that generates native code on the fly. It also has an extremely aggressive incremental garbage collection mechanism that reclaims memory more efficiently.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Chrome internals is the multiprocess design. Each individual tab and plugin runs within its own process in order to boost stability and prevent memory fragmentation. When a rendering bug within a page causes a crash, the tab will go down but the rest of the browser will remain unaffected.

Users can launch Chrome's built-in task manager to see how how the memory is distributed across the entire browser. This is extremely beneficial because it will make it easy for users to identify which pages are hogging memory. Users often blame the browser for heavy memory use, but the culprit is often poorly-designed web pages. The task manager might give web developers an incentive to be more careful.

Chrome will provide even more detailed information through the about:memory page, which will even compare Chrome's resource consumption against that of other actively running browsers.

We conducted some tests to compare Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. Although the results vary widely between tests and shouldn't be considered as an authoritative comparison, Chrome's multiprocess design generally incurs a higher memory overhead than other browsers.

Internet Explorer 8 offers a similar feature, but doesn't do a one-to-one relationship between tabs and processes. IE8 attempts to hit a more even balance between resource consumption and reliability by using fewer processes.

Another similarity between IE and Chrome is that both use Vista's integrity protection security model to insulate the user from web malware and other attacks. In Chrome, individual tab processes are run with low integrity permissions which effectively limits the damage that can be caused by a security exploit.

Market impact

Chrome is still in the early stages of development, but it could have an impact on the browser landscape when it starts to mature. Many have speculated that toppling Internet Explorer is the ultimate goal behind Chrome, but that's not going to happen overnight. The initial audience for Chrome will primarily consist of early adopters and technology enthusiasts, so we can expect to see it cannibalizing some market share from Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

If Google aggressively courts OEMs and gets them to preinstall Chrome on consumer desktops, then the company could start to gain some serious traction against Internet Explorer. If Google doesn't pursue preinstallation opportunities, then it is likely that Chrome will make only modest inroads.

During a press conference today, a Google spokesperson said that the company intends to pursue multiple vectors of distribution, but he declined to provide details about any specific plans.

Google has kicked off Chrome with a strong product. Although the software feels polished and robust, the early stage of development is clearly revealed in its lack of support for advanced features like RSS integration and full bookmark management. If Google continues to invest in moving Chrome forward and manages to build up some community involvement, though, the new browser could quickly become a shiny new contender in the browser market.