Free Software Stuff

Chrome this, Chrome that

The amount of hype that the newest Google project has received is staggering. Googling for “google chrome” already gives more than 12 million results, and should soon join the 70+mil ranks of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and other celebrities as one of the most buzzed up buzzword on the planet.

It will kill Windows, bring us into the Cloud Age, it’s been called a game changer, a Firefox/Opera/Safari killer, an operating system, the best thing since sliced bread, …

WTF. Let me repeat myself, W. T. F. The way it’s been received, they could’ve called it Google Christ.

Is the browser itself any good? Probably. Is it worth all this charade? No. In fact, the more I hear anyone and everyone and their dog blabbing about it, the more I grow dislike for it. But, whatever. Let me quickly go through killer features:

• Tabs in separate processes. Good idea, tab isolation really helps when you hit a bloated site (and it does scale nicely on multicores). [not extremely innovative though, as I hear IE8beta already does the same])
• Fast JavaScript implementation. Again, cool, but nothing special. Squirrelfish and TraceMonkey performance is close enough (or faster, depending on exact benchmark - but we all know benchmarks are lies anyways :). While V8 will ensure more competition, they could’ve just joined in with one of the other opensource projects (which both SquirrelFish and SpiderMonkey and Tamarin are).
• Innovative UI. Which I confess I fail to see. The most disruptive change is placing the toolbar inside each tab. Cute (and really makes more sense), but no cleaner than Firefox (or even better, GNOME Epiphany) can do.
• Start page. Basically what Opera does, plus a few things Aza Raskin is trying to tell us for quite some time.
• Gears built-in. Nice, but since you already can use Gears with other browsers, not much of a change. Other browsers are moving in the same direction (with their respective solutions for offline web apps).
• The comic. IMHO the best part of the Chrome story :-)

Are the abovementioned features great? Definitely. Are they really something extra, different, and impossible to see in a few months in any other browser? Nope.

Actually, it’s quite easy to implement most of them in a few hours of idle hacking, which I did. I proudly present you Senko Chrome, my very own competition to Google’s project (written in Python using the Gecko engine and GTK+ GUI toolkit, and probably only works on Linux). I’ve followed basically the same guidelines as Google folks, and my browser has the following features:

• Tabs in separate processes, thus using the OS scheduler and having memory-hog protection between sites. Easy to test by going to two JS-heavy sites and using them both withouth freezes, delays and stutters (the more cores you have, the better, but already works fine on single core).
• Fast JS performance. Not as fast as Chrome, since I’m using Firefox3 backend, but had I wanted, I could recompile it using the new TraceMonkey and achieve basically the same performance.
• Less-cluttered UI with toolbar under each tab. Not as polished as Chrome (pun not intended), but hey, I only had couple of hours.
• Start page, something similar to Chrome’s. Mine shows a search bar and a few favorite sites. Since I don’t track history between sessions, it’s actually a static page, but hey, I did only have a couple of hours. Besides, it’s like everything’s incognito, because I don’t save/remember anything.

Of course, not being a finished browser, many of the normal things (keyboard nav, open in new tab, right-click, etc) just don’t work in Senko Chrome, but hey, that’s beside the point.

Does this mean I think Google Chrome is worthless? Absolutely not. I think it’s an interesting browser, it’s pushing good features, and it will help stirr up the web browser competition and ultimately contribute in making a better Web for everyone.

But please, don’t get so hysterical over a bunch of features that can be implemented in an afternoon, mmkay?

obligatory Senko Chrome screenshot

(PS. If you want to try out Senko Chrome, you’ll need Python, PyGTK and Python bindings for GtkMozEmbed (Gecko embedding in GTK+). Unzip the archive in a folder and run schrome.py. If you want to run a single page (no tabs), run onepage.py directly).